The coverage of the article was consistent with the picture of the pharmaceutical industry built up in the Australian quality media, of an avaricious enterprise, subordinating the interests of sick people to the need for profit. Doctors are presented as gullible accomplices whose critical and independent judgement can be inactivated by a free dinner. The industry is accused of furthering its ends by phoney educational programs for doctors which, it is claimed, are just a cover for promoting new and expensive products when older and cheaper ones are equally effective, and by using dubious statistics to exaggerate the new agents effectiveness. A point not quite made in The New England Journal paper was that the interface between medical research, which includes the pharmaceutical industry, and journalism is very flawed. Few journalists seem to have an understanding of modern biology, research ambience or the way medical research is funded, adequate to meet public expectations of relevance and accuracy.
Reportage is driven by the idea of breakthroughs or miracle cures.
In these scenarios, scientists move in a flash of inspiration from prostration in the face of disease to triumph. Stories make even better copy if a single person or research team can be identified as being exclusively responsible. The journalists who report in these terms probably know as well as any scientist that such things virtually never occur. Our understanding of biological processes progresses at a painful creep, each advance usually the result of work by multiple groups of scientists. Only rarely is there a sudden flash of insight and this is usually retrospective.