Sentiment of Media Coverage and Reputation of the Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

Patients and health care professionals receive information about pharmaceutical companies through various sources, including but not limited to print media, social media, and electronic media. The objective of this research was to benchmark the sentiment of electronic newspaper media coverage between 2014 and 2016 and investigate the potential relationship to the public perception of the select pharmaceutical companies. Reputation Institute's RepTrak System report was used for selection of 5 highly rated pharmaceutical companies (A-E). Electronic newspapers were selected based on US circulation within the selected time period. Lexalytics sentiment analysis software was used for analysis of relevant articles appearing in the selected newspapers. A total of 797 articles were analyzed; 63% were assessed as neutral, 24% as negative, and 14% as positive. The overall median sentiment scores (scale ranging from -2 through +2) for companies A through E across all newspapers were determined to be +0.026, +0.03, +0.028, +0.034, and +0.033, respectively. The most frequent topics were merger/acquisition/re-structuring, finances/stocks/profits, and other, which included topics such as transparency of pharmaceutical industry data, lack of drug efficacy, and innovation. Overall, pharmaceutical companies were represented similarly across newspapers and most articles were assessed as neutral. However, on analysis of all nonneutral articles, all categories were assessed as negative with the exception of finances/stocks/profits.