Prescription For Bias
Networks Downplay Drug Costs,
Treat Medicine as Entitlement
 

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Anxiety over Ambien

     According to a commercial, “Ambien: it can help you sleep.” According to the network news, Ambien can also wreck your car.

     Even before Rep. Patrick Kennedy’s (D-R.I.) purportedly Ambien-influenced car accident in Washington in May 2006, the networks devoted attention to the phenomenon of “sleep driving.” Four of the six stories on Ambien ran in March, following a New York Times story centered on that phenomenon.

     On the March 8 “Nightly News,” NBC anchor Brian Williams found “Ambien drivers” to be “a growing menace of some sort on the American road.” Williams didn’t cite any statistical data to back up the claim that the problem was significant or growing.

     One sleep expert, Dr. Charles Cantor, raised legitimate concerns about drug addiction on the June 27 “NBC Nightly News.” “The theoretical problem is that they may become tolerant to the medication and require increasing doses,” the University of Pennsylvania physician said of Ambien.

     Yet rather than presenting “sleep driving” as rare and more likely to occur with misuse or addictive overuse, NBC suggested the behavior was simply a problem, and hinted it was widespread.

     On May 7, just three days after the Kennedy incident, reporter Rehema Ellis told viewers the Democratic congressman was “just the latest person involved in bizarre behavior to say, in effect, ‘The Ambien made me do it.’”

     It wasn’t just NBC that hyped the Ambien driver story. On the March 9 “World News Tonight,” reporter Lisa Stark filed a story on strange behavior patients exhibited under the influence of the sleeping pill.

     Stark didn’t warn viewers who might be on Ambien to consult with their doctors if they noticed problems, although she did give time to sleep specialist Dr. Michael Cramer-Bornemann to suggest that label warnings “need to be more apparent” to both physicians and patients.

     To the media, Ambien “sleep driving” was another “growing menace” to hype rather than a medical phenomenon to present dispassionately.