<<<However, to suggest as you did that business writers as a whole have become the pawns of naked shortsellers is carrying healthy skepticism into the realm of InvestorVillage paranoia, IMO.>>>
Dew point taken. Clearly, most business journalists are not such pawns. But I will say that there are selected journalists who clearly are. Going back to Rambus when the leading industry journalist (whose name I forget now) actually admitted to being on the payroll of Micron et al. He was the sought after first opinion on the DRAM industry. Admittedly, I made a lot of money as this journalist helped push the share price down despite the objective evidence in front of us.
Similarly, there are those in the biotech press. Primarily however, I believe it is just lazy journalists. I've been a journalist, and it is very tempting to take stories that are easy to write, without much research, when supposes objective experts in the field come to you with story ideas and quotations.
Here you have doctors working on campath that I am sure were put up by Bayer (tacitly that is) or that intern who I am sure was put up (tacitly again) by Schering Plough. I find it all over the place, and they seem to focus primarily on pieces that make the Internet for quick hitting effect.
Some are more blatant than others, like Teva's use of a journal to put out there that tysabri was the equivalent of drug induced AIDS. Others are just a combination of lazy journalists, and journalists who are tacitly cooperating with industry leading companies, and sometimes both.
In this case, the article itself appears to be so misleading that it is worthless. I think we need to read the NEJM article to know for sure as the information that has been presented by the actual NEJM article on campath describes a drug that is totally divorced from the one presented in the article, much less a drug that can be said to be clearly more effective and safer than tysabri.
It is part of the business I guess. There is money to be made from such articles for investors, and small biotech companies are not real good at utilizing such "marketing" channels, but larger companies appear to be very good at it for whatever reason.
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