Doctor Doctor, Give Me the News

by Daniel Price

Nobody puts out more video news releases than the healthcare industry. But their easy-to-swallow propaganda comes with side effects.

On January 10, Indianapolis TV health reporter Stacia Matthews had some good news for women with metastatic breast cancer: there's a new drug called Abraxane that has twice the effectiveness of the leading chemotherapy treatment and fewer adverse reactions. The news report included compelling testimony from Annice O'Brien, a mother of two who had been battling breast cancer for eight years. "It made me once again feel like I'm going to beat this," she told Matthews.

However, she didn't really tell Matthews directly. The clip was part of a video news release (VNR) commissioned by American Pharmaceutical Partners, the makers of Abraxane. It was produced by a major PR/media communications firm and distributed by satellite to TV stations all across the country (see sidebar for more on how VNRs are distributed). Within hours, the Abraxane feature had been seamlessly blended into at least seven different newscasts in five major cities. Not one of the stations had identified American Pharmaceutical Partners as the source of the story. Some, like WRTV-6 Indianapolis, furthered the illusion of journalism by editing the voice of their own reporter into the segment.

An image of Abraxane from RNews.com, Rochester, NY's cable news channel.

While there has been much hullaballoo over the Bush administration's use of canned news as a propaganda tool, very few critics have extended their outrage to the corporate sector, who have relied on VNRs to sell their products, services and agendas for over twenty years. And in the business world, no one has relied on and benefitted from pre-packaged news more than healthcare companies.

According to a 2002 survey by DS Simon Productions (a leading VNR producer and the creator of the Abraxane package), 88 percent of TV stations use VNRs from medical, pharmaceutical and biotech corporations in their newscasts, and 82 percent of stations used more VNRs that year than the year before. As the median age of the TV news audience rises well beyond the AARP line, so does the demand for health stories.

Indeed, for the Kaisers and Pfizers of the world, who spend millions of dollars each year on direct-to-consumer marketing, the VNR is the greatest invention since the celebrity shill. The advantages that healthcare VNRs have over traditional advertising are numerous. For starters, they're much cheaper to produce. A top-quality VNR can be created and distributed for less than $30,000, and could score a comparative ad value in the six-figure range if it gets airtime in multiple metropolitan markets. Furthermore, the FDA restrictions on healthcare VNRs are still fairly loose. Unlike advertisements, VNRs aren't required to be submitted for advance FDA approval. Even if federal regulators did have a problem with the facts or claims presented in a news release, by the time they issued a complaint, the VNR would be long out of rotation.

But the most important and obvious benefit of VNRs for anyone who uses them is the ability to deliver a targeted message to the public through the false veneer of professional journalism. Whereas press releases are primarily a tool to entice favorable attention from reporters, VNRs are designed to replace the reporter entirely. The standard VNR package includes everything a content-starved news producer could ever hope to receive, such as broadcast-quality video, fancy technical animations, a completely polished script, and a collection of relevant clips and sound bites, including unedited interviews and locations shots.

More than that, a VNR typically includes tools for "customization" that allow and encourage news stations to pass the story off as their very own product. Within the kit of disguises are split audio channels, which enable producers to replace the VNR's original narration with the familiar voice of their own reporter, and separately-provided identifiers, which make it easy for editor to insert station-branded text overlays into the story.

For a healthcare company, the only risk involved with a VNR is that a station might use the footage as a springboard for a more nuanced (and thus less favorable) story. But that would require actual journalism, a force that's rapidly disappearing from mainstream media outlets. In truth, the TV news business has become so decimated by bottom-line economics over the past twenty years that some local affiliates are forced to put out four to six hours of news each day with a staff as small as twenty. Not only does that increase a station's dependence on VNRs to fill their ever-widening news hole, but the chronic lack of resources prevents them from balancing or even fact-checking the content they get from publicists.

Had anyone at WRTV-6 found the time or the incentive to do even a simple Google search on American Pharmaceutical Partners before airing the Abraxane VNR, they would have learned that the company was then being sued by a group of its own investors for making false claims and performing flawed clinical research on, you guessed it, Abraxane (the lawsuit has since been dropped).

Unfortunately, the viewers in Indianapolis who watched the "health" segment that night were denied the thought, context, and balance that comes from genuine medical reporting. All they were given was a corporate advertisement in easy-to-swallow news form. That may be great for the healthcare business, but it's bad medicine for the rest of us.

Daniel Price is an author living in Los Angeles. His debut novel SLICK, a tale of PR and media manipulation, was released by Random House in 2004.