Big Pharma Owns Corporate Media, And It's Killing People

According to a 2009 study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, with the exception of CBS every major media outlet in the United States shares at least one board member with at least one drug company. Let's put it in perspective for you, these board members wake up, they go to a meeting at Merck or Pfizer, and then they have their driver take them over to a meeting with NBC to decide what kind of programming that network is going to air. For those board members who aren't pulling double duty with a media conglomerate and a big drug company, they still understand that they can't be honest and objective about big pharma because big pharma pays their bills.

Mike Papantonio explains this.

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Drug companies spend about $5 billion a year on advertising with these corporate media outlets, so when Pfizer or Merck or Eli Lilly, or any of the drug companies, kill or cripple Americans with defective drugs, do you really think these board members are going to allow their story to be told on the air? It can take anywhere from three days to a full week before the media reports on a drug or a medical device recall, if they report at all.

In the case of Invokana it took 32 days before television outlets reported a single story involving an FDA warning about the potential problems with the product. The FDA began warning about the extreme dangers of Cook IVC filters as early as 2010 and it took about five years, five years, before television media started reporting that to the public. It's worth pointing out that in these instances it was only through non-corporate independent media outlets that these stories were told at all. It was the outlets who weren't being forced, they weren't being forced to remain silent about the drug industry.

You can replace IVC or Invokana with any other drug or product and the story is all the same. Stryker hip implants, C8, Vioxx, RoundUp, Xarelto, talcum powder, they're all the same thing. The corporate media doesn't care about these stories because they either share board members with these companies, or because they want those companies to keep throwing dollars their way in big advertising dollars. These gigantic media corporations aren't going to do anything to threaten their relationship with big advertisers.

Drugs are cash cow advertising bonanza for corporate media. Fortunately an increase in number of Americans who are starting to wake up and realize that the mainstream media shouldn't be trusted on issues like this. In recent years we've seen the alternative media experience rapid growth and mainstream media has been losing credibility at a staggering rate. Americans are starting to look elsewhere for the truth about what's really going on out there. As a result of that advertising money kicking around the corporate media isn't permitted to report complex drug stories anymore.

It's as if they don't understand things like the link between crony capitalism and the revolving door between the FDA and the drug industry, but the media is only one side of the story here. Big pharma knows that if it wants to continue manipulating the public it has to start with our elected officials in Washington DC. According to OpenSecrets, big pharma spent more than $58 million on politicians just in 2016, the most amount they've spend on a direct contribution in the last quarter century.

When it comes to lobbying, few industry spend more than big pharma did last year. They spent a staggering $244 million dollars to influence our elected leaders in Washington DC. It looks like things are about to get much worse, you see, big pharma understands that the ridiculous ... their price gouging is starting to draw negative attention from the American public, and no matter how much they spend advertising or buying our politicians, they can't keep the public anger down forever.