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RFK Jr. and the Approaching Death of Major Media
It’s been rumored for quite some time, and on Monday it popped all over X: Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to announce very soon that pharmaceutical advertising on television will be a thing of the past.
Attention America:
Every time you turn on the TV, Big Pharma is there pushing drugs instead of real health solutions.
Most countries ban these ads, but in the U.S., profit wins over public health.
America, what’s your take?
Should we ban pharmaceutical ads on TV?
MAHA
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr – Commentary News (@RobertKennedyJc) March 22, 2025
There are many facets to this. You’ll hear from some quarters that it’s a First Amendment issue, that pharmaceutical companies should have the right to advertise just like any other legal business can. That’s one argument. Another argument is that only the U.S.A. and New Zealand allow drug ads on the tube, or at least prescription drug ads.
Yet another argument involves whether Kennedy, or President Trump by executive order, has the power to dictate whether pharma ads can run on television. Some say this would have to be a statutory change and Congress would have to pass a bill to ban those ads.
Are those ads corrupting the medical practice? I have a friend who’s a general practitioner, and he tells me all the time of his amazement at patients coming in and demanding prescriptions for specific drugs they’ve seen on TV, often for things they very demonstrably do not need. On the other hand, the way Big Pharma pushes its wares on doctors will likely be unchanged and even perhaps more aggressive if they’re not able to push back-end demand by advertising directly to the public.
I’m probably not qualified to give any particularly cogent analysis on those questions. But if Kennedy gets the administration to knock ads for prescription drugs off television, you’ll shortly hear the bell tolling for those massive media conglomerates who own the big TV networks and four-fifths or more of all the channels on cable TV.
Why? In an X post on Monday, syndicated radio host Steve Gruber gave a pretty good lowdown…
In 2020, the pharmaceutical industry significantly increased its television advertising expenditure in the United States, spending approximately $4.58 billion on national TV ads. This amount represented a substantial portion of the total TV ad spend for that year. statista.com+1brown-watch.com+1 By 2024, this trend continued, with pharmaceutical companies investing around $3.4 billion in linear TV advertising during the first eight months alone, marking an 8.1 percent year-over-year increase. These ads generated 54.2 billion household TV ad impressions, a 4.2 percent increase compared to the previous year. (http://emarketer.com)
Moreover, in March 2023, prescription pharmaceutical brands were the leading spenders on national TV advertising, allocating an estimated $403.4 million. This figure was nearly double the amount spent by the second-highest category, automakers, which spent $216.1 million during the same period. foxbusiness.com+3adweek.com+3moneydigest.com+3 These figures underscore the pharmaceutical industry’s substantial investment in television advertising within the United States.
That money is simply gigantic. In a podcast clip you’ve likely seen by now, Patrick Bet David notes that it’s three-quarters of the national advertising revenue on TV.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is gearing up to ban pharmaceutical commercials on television. The United States is currently only one of two countries in the world that permit pharmaceutical advertisements on TV.
Businessman and podcaster Patrick Bet-David notes, “Big… pic.twitter.com/CDR2X8KhO0
— DeVory Darkins (@devorydarkins) March 24, 2025
But as Calley Means noted in a Tucker Carlson interview in late November of last year, the penetration of the consumer market isn’t why Pharma owns TV. That money is being spent for a different purpose — namely, to buy-off network and local news coverage so that nothing negative will be said on those airwaves about the industry and its products.
Calley Means exposes how big pharma runs ads to buy off the media and that it’s an open secret when you work for big pharma.
75%of ad revenue on cable television comes from the pharmaceutical industry. pic.twitter.com/6B8EsY2Ctm
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) November 29, 2024
What effect has this had? Colossal. It’s corrupted the profession of journalism, for certain. When was the last time you saw a national broadcast or cable news report on product liability in the pharmaceutical industry? You don’t even see those for COVID vaccine industries, and that’s something you ought to be seeing wall-to-wall coverage of. Consider this study…
The scope of the pregnancy complications in this study are of great concern and consistent with the vast obstetrical experience of the authors’ observations. The catastrophic effects of the COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy are associated with nearly every obstetrical/neonatal complication imaginable.
Placental abnormalities also exhibited a substantial breach in safety signals including placental insufficiency, placental calcification, placental infarction, placental thrombosis, placenta accreta, and other placental disorders. The placental abnormalities noted in this study are consistent with clinical observations from sonographers and physicians reviewing ultrasound images prior to birth and are depicted in Figure 1. Figure 1 depicts three separate women’s third trimester fetal ultrasound images documenting classic features observed after administration of COVID-19 vaccines earlier in pregnancy.
Many of these findings are consistent with multiple pregnancy adverse events described in this report including placental calcifications, placental insufficiency, placental infarction, placental thrombosis, placenta accreta, placental disorders, reduced amniotic fluid volume, and fetal growth restriction. The placental images demonstrate calcifications (c), lacunae (L), and infarcts (i) as pictured in Figure 1. This present study investigating AEs in pregnancy following COVID-19 vaccination is consistent with two other Pfizer sources[3,6] and two prior FDA/CDC VAERS sources, as discussed below [4,5].
It’s a very fat gravy train, and those media conglomerates are riding well atop it.
NB there were no pharma ads on TV before the 1990s – this restriction was removed by Bill Clinton. And I’m sure the massive advertising spend by pharmaceutical companies has no influence on how stories about them are reported.
— Scott Davis (@scottdavisCRE) March 24, 2025
They’ll have to fill a whole lot of avails if the drug ads go away…
“In the U.S., Nearly 31% of ad minutes on major nightly news broadcasts in 2024 came from pharmaceutical brands”.
It’s basically legalized drug pushing.
Drug companies are not allowed to advertise prescription drugs directly to the public on TV in the European Union. https://t.co/woU1uZ5h7X
— CatDog99 (@dog99_cat) March 24, 2025
And a major cultural shift would be coming…
Pharma ads are at least 25% of cable TV ads. And they bombard young people with the message that you need drugs to be happy.
Almost a third of teens are already on a prescription drug, and it’ll get worse unless something changes. https://t.co/nT6ruD6uS3
— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) February 25, 2025
Only the US and NZ allow direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising on TV.
No surprise the US consumes 40-45% of all pharmaceuticals globally, whilst having terrible health outcomes.
Selling drugs that people don’t need to make Big Pharma more money is obviously a terrible… https://t.co/nDncdg30Ce
— Sanjeev Jeyakumar (@sanj_jey) March 24, 2025
Almost assuredly the networks and local TV stations will try to replace that revenue wherever they can get it, and this could have good and bad implications.
One good implication is that those stations and networks will have to cultivate a broader base of advertisers because the Big Pharma whales will then be out of the market. That could help reinvigorate the advertising market; it will certainly re-professionalize it because with the massive subsidies Pharma has been providing to those media conglomerates, driving positive results for marketers has fallen off the list of priorities for many of them.
They’ll have to learn how to drive return on investment for their advertisers again. This means putting shows on TV that people actually want to watch rather than woke crap the corporate elite have been demanding. With those drug ads covering the airwaves and making the networks fat, quality control hasn’t been all that much of an issue. Now it’s going to be.
The bad implication is that most of these channels, networks, and parent companies won’t survive, and you’ll likely see a fire sale at those media conglomerates.
But this isn’t altogether a bad thing unless you were dumb enough to have stock in these corporations (if you still have it, get out now — this is not a dip you want to buy). Because re-democratizing the media space, particularly in an era when the incentive to cut the cord on cable has never been greater, is where we need to be.
Let hundreds of companies compete where only a few currently exist. This column talks about the absurdity of a talentless clown like Margaret Brennan serving as a prominent “journalist” at CBS News when I could easily name two dozen independent podcasters and journalists with far larger audiences and better reputations; take away the bribe money from Big Pharma and CBS would have no choice but to find anchors and reporters with far more competence and prestige than Brennan. (RELATED: How Much Longer Is CBS Going to Carry Margaret Brennan?)
And on the entertainment side, the standard for attracting audiences would have to be substantially greater. Because subscription revenue is the future if drug ads go away, and there are only a very few cable channels whose programming could command any real subscription revenue. They exist as receptacles for rating points for their parent companies to park those drug ads into, and so the only standard for many of those channels is how cheaply can they attract sets of eyes.
When those channels are sold to smaller companies not floating on a sea of legacy cash, they’ll actually have to fight for those rating points.
Most won’t be able to do that successfully.
And the television business will have an economic depression that rivals its current creative depression.
Which is just. And, as it happens, the resulting forest fire creates the only real opportunity that industry will have to reinvent itself and recover any crediblity or relevance.
If it doesn’t, and the age of mass media dies away, then so be it.
People will still seek entertainment. We’ll still be looking for something to watch. Someone will present us with options.
Will Kennedy’s drug ad ban make America healthy again? I don’t know. But it will certainly shake up one of the laziest, most corrupt, and underperforming sectors of our economy, and that alone is an encouraging prospect.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Five Quick Things: The Well-Deserved Disgust of the American People
This Mess Is of Your Own Making, Chief Justice Roberts
Entitlement Fraud Is Now a Stated Aim of the Democrat Party
The post RFK Jr. and the Approaching Death of Major Media appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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