Dirty dancing: Health journalists and the pharmaceutical industry a multi-method study on the impact of pharma PR on magazine health news

Applying a multi-method approach, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the complex ways in which Belgian magazines deal with health information supplied by PR practitioners related to the pharmaceutical industry. First, we conducted two waves of quantitative content analysis of health items published in 2013 and 2015 in a representative sample of magazines to get an overview of the sourcing practices of Belgian magazine journalists as visible in the news output. Second, we included 16 in-depth interviews with leading magazine health journalists and their editors-in-chief to confront the findings of the content analyses and search for additional evidence of how the pharmaceutical industry directly and indirectly tries to influence health news. The findings confirm that academic and medical experts are the most important sources. They help to explain and contextualize often complex and technical health issues, and they credit authority and credibility to a journalist's story. In contrast, we found very little explicit references to pharmaceutical industry sources in journalistic content. Nevertheless, the findings of the interviews suggest that pharmaceutical PR creeps into health coverage in a more indirect and much more sophisticated manner, for instance by offering additional services such as contacts with scientists or patients. In addition, editors-in-chief admit they try to anticipate the needs and preferences of advertisers in aligning editorial and commercial content. We conclude that the influence of pharmaceutical PR in magazine health news is stronger than would be expected based solely on quantitative analyses of editorial content.