Shannon Brownlee discusses direct-to-consumer drug marketing and the media...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do the drug companies make use of the press?

SHANNON BROWNLEE: Let me answer the question by kind of going at it from the perspective of the media, who are bombarded with information from a variety of sources.

One of those sources is The National Sleep Foundation, which sends out its poll and wants us to write about the results of that poll.

Number two, we get information from universities. So one of the places that did some of the research on [the sleep drug] Lunesta was Duke, and what Duke’s P.R. office did is it offered the press a patient who said Lunesta was the greatest thing that ever happened to her, and it offered up a researcher, a Dr. Andrew Krystal.

And it turns out that Dr. Krystal is paid by the company that makes Lunesta, and the press is offered these people as if it's all coming completely independently out of Duke University. So then a bunch of people wrote stories on Lunesta based on that press release...

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