Speaking with former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura on an episode of “Off The Grid“, Kennedy revealed that 70% of ad revenue for major news networks comes from big pharma.

“I ate breakfast last week with the president of a network news division and he told me that during non-election years, 70% of the advertising revenues for his news division come from pharmaceutical ads. And if you go on TV any night and watch the network news, you’ll see they become just a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals. He also told me that he would fire a host who brought onto his station a guest who lost him a pharmaceutical account,” Kennedy said. 

Like many of the business issues we are facing today, the problem with the drug industry is that it is controlled by a government protected corporate cartel. This allows a select few corporations to dominate the market, preventing entrepreneurs from developing new products that could threaten this monopoly. Without having to worry about any kind of competition this cartel can make their products as harmful and ineffective as they like. Thanks to government protections they are able to make their products more addicting and less effective so they can create return customers and extend their profits. If a medication is effective in curing a patient then they won’t continually use and purchase that drug because they will have no need to do so. However, if the drug is mediocre and has addictive properties then it will become a regular part of the patient’s monthly budget.

This deceptive strategy proved to be quite lucrative so the drug companies launched a massive advertising campaign to peddle a wide variety of ineffective and unnecessary drugs to a trusting and ignorant public. This industry actually spends more money on advertising than they do on research and development every single year. That fact alone shows that they are more interested in making sales than producing a well-researched and effective drug. Today’s television and radio commercial spots are dominated by advertisements for mediocre pharmaceuticals. Companies pay billions of dollars per year on advertising alone and their investment comes back many times over. This advertising budget includes “incentives” for personal care providers to overwrite prescriptions, or in other words bribes for doctors to sell more drugs.

Think about it this way, on MSNBC you are seeing the views that would benefit Microsoft and General Electric, on FOX you are seeing views that would benefit News Corp and on CNN you are seeing views that would benefit Time Warner.

Additionally, you have more multinational corporations with their own agendas advertising on their network, providing a source of income that the broadcasters come to depend on. For example, major military contractors like Northrop Grumman or Boeing have tons of commercials all over the mainstream news, but what average citizen has any interest in the products that these companies have to offer? Are rocket launchers and aircraft carriers on the average American’s shopping list? Of course not!

Well, then why do these military contractors spend so much money on television advertisements? So they can use those advertising dollars as leverage against the broadcaster, in order to control how their corporation is presented in the news. If a broadcaster is being paid millions of dollars per month by Boeing to run their commercials then they aren’t going to be able to say anything negative about the war, it’s that simple.

John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war.

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