A drug marketing company called Healthology has been hiring journalists from local television and radio stations to appear in video Webcasts, The New York Times reports. The Healthology programs are available through the Web sites of many large newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald. Drug makers pay for the Webcasts, which feature the journalists interviewing doctors and patients about their products, The Times said.
What’s particularly alarming about this is that it’s not always clear that the videos and related articles are advertorials. “The LAT, for one, which both integrates the material into its Web site and devotes a whole subsection of the site to the content: latimes.healthology.com,” says Slate’s Eric Umansky. There’s no notice on any of the pages about whether the information is editorial or an advertisement. If the LAT is getting paid to publish this stuff, it had better say so.”
The New York Times reports.
