Can media relations promote public health? The pharmaceutical sector in the Portuguese press

Abstract

The research project "Disease in the news" (FCT) has been constituted as an observatory of media information on health, produced in Portugal since 2008. In this context, we have undertaken a systematic study of the work of the institutional sources of the health sector, the promotion of information to citizen by the media. This study includes an examination of journalistic texts produced by three national newspapers - Expresso, Público e Jornal de Notícias - and a direct contact with healthcare organizations identified as media sources. For this research, we analyse the presence of the pharmaceutical industry in the national press, looking for more clues about the role of the organizations in the health sector when delivering information to the public - through the media - and, consequently, in health promotion. This work has some theoretical references: the area of health communication and health promotion, and the organizational communication and public relations. Previous research had focused on a study of more visible journalistic sources (clearly, official sources; Lopes et al. 2011). It was time to examine the marginal presences. The pharmaceutical industry is one of these cases, despite having organized and highly experienced communication structures. In this context, we decided to investigate how to draw the advice "low profile" of pharmaceutical companies, in Portugal, from: (1) a quantitative analysis of journalistic texts (found in the papers above), (2) a analysis content to those same texts, and (3) interviews with the communication departments of pharmaceutical companies. We start the investigation of a corpus of 290 newspaper articles, with references to pharmaceutical companies practices (representing only 4.6% of total health texts published during the study period – 2008-2011).