An analysis of polish daily newspapersí coverage of current societal debates on ethical issues concerning the production, use and sale of medicinal drugs

Abstract

This article aims to identify ethical issues relating to the production, use and sale of medicinal drugs as presented in the two most influential Polish daily newspapers, and to consider the tone of the coverage these newspapers provide. Quantitative content analysis was used to analyze articles in the main editions of Gazeta Wyborcza (GW) and Rzeczpospolita (RP) in the period from 1st January 2010 to 31stDecember 2017, with 4307 articles containing relevant keywords being identified and 1225 articles ultimately being included in the sample of articles analyzed: 438 from GW and 787 from RP. The most frequently discussed issue was reimbursement of payment for medicines (35.8% of articles), followed by the need for drug-related healthcare reform (23.0%), and drug safety (21.4%). In both newspapers, the headlines of analyzed articles were mostly negative (GW ñ 43.8%, RP ñ 42.2%). The full-texts of GW articles tended to have a negative tone (54.6%), while the tone tended to be more neutral in RP (47.0%). Logistic regression showed that the negative tone of full texts related to the increasingly important issues of high drug prices and data disclosure while articles with a positive tone reported on the research and development of new drugs and genomics and biologics. Most of the articles (75.4%) did not include the pharmaceutical industryís perspective. Press content analyses are a valuable source of information that the pharmaceutical industry can use to manage its image in the media.