Ex-CBS Reporter Reveals How Big Pharma Took Over the News Media

Sharyl Atkisson says “something changed” in 2006.

Award-winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson is blowing the whistle on how pharmaceutical companies slowly took control of the media—beginning around 2006. According to Attkisson, this shift didn’t happen overnight, but looking back, she says the warning signs were there.

In the early 2000s, mainstream media platforms like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough gave airtime to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to discuss vaccine safety. Notably, Scarborough even shared that his own son had suffered a vaccine injury. Even Atkission herself was able to do reports on the flu vaccine’s abysmal efficacy.

But soon after, that kind of coverage disappeared. “And then all of a sudden, it just all went away,” Jimmy Dore noted.

So what happened?

Attkisson admitted that, at the time, she didn’t fully understand what was happening behind the scenes. It wasn’t until later that the bigger picture came into focus. The pharmaceutical industry, she realized, had started forming direct partnerships with major media companies—including CBS News, where she worked.

At the corporate level, media companies and pharma giants were joining forces, even lobbying Congress together to loosen long-standing restrictions on pharmaceutical advertising.

Until then, she noted, advertising prescription drugs on television was not just rare—it was illegal. “This was forbidden, against the law,” she said, and it remains forbidden in most countries around the world. But in the U.S., the rules were changed. And the result was staggering: billions, and eventually trillions, of advertising dollars flowing into the media industry.

That flood of money didn’t just affect commercials—it began influencing what stories could and couldn’t be told. “We were starting to feel the effects of it in the news division at CBS,” she said. “Lobbyists from the corporation at CBS went together with pharmaceutical industry lobbyists on Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress.”

The outcome, she warned, was devastating for public health. While pharma worked to increase profits, the media—now financially entangled—stopped holding them accountable. “They’re funding their non-investigation,” she said. “It largely influences the stories that don’t get done.”

Attkisson also emphasized that media executives and managers weren’t asking for “balance” anymore. The censorship was more blunt: “They were just saying, ‘We can’t tell this story at all. The people must not know about it,’” Atkisson revealed.

She believes the American media was supposed to act as a firewall—offering oversight, especially when Congress fails to do so. But that firewall collapsed under the weight of pharmaceutical dollars.

WATCH:

Former Pharma consultant Calley Means talked about this explicitly not too long ago on Tucker Carlson’s podcast.

He attested that the true goal of pharma ads on TV is not to sell drugs but to BUY OFF the news media, describing it as an “open secret” within the pharmaceutical industry.

Most of us already sense this is true, but hearing it confirmed by two industry insiders hits differently. The truth is that Big Pharma has the TV news on a leash. And until that funding disappears, you can’t trust a single word they say about your health.

Watch the full video below:

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