To what end though? I'm not conspiratorially asking "what was their real angle?", but the much more simple "why did they think it was newsworthy for a non-doctor audience?"
I've seen the NYT run articles on a regulated industry I happen to work in. I'm no doctor, but I can see parallels because everything is slow moving and presumably based on expert opinion. Coverage of subtle points is surrounded by laughably bad analysis that drops a line of facts that lead the reader into conclusions they don't include in the print. Because if they printed it, the counterargument would be swift and damning. But without them explicitly saying it I'm "conspiratorial" if I say they're implying it. They then go on to make a wide-ranging hamfisted policy prescription that don't make sense for the subtle issue we started with and I'm 110% on board for fixing, but do make sense if you believe the unstated intermediary conclusion.
As for why it was reported at all, a health issue of interest to many thousands of people would seem to be newsworthy.
Finally, there were articles published by media outlets that showed potential problems with these prescriptions [0][1] And those were just what I found in a minute or two of searching. All available evidence shows that media outlets used prevailing scientific opinions of the time, and still managed to raise appropriate questions when issue began to arise.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/19...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1996/06/18/dc-i...
If there had been significant opposition to this at the time, I would agree that news media failed. But I just searched through ProQuest and Google Scholar for research journals during 1990-2000 and I didn't find much at all that points towards significant risks of increased prescribing of these drugs. Quite the opposite, they pointed towards them being underutilized and leaving patients in significant pain despite low risk of addiction.
As it turns out, doctors were wrong. But it's only in the last few years that the scope of the issue has really come to light. I can't fault the media for not knowing 25 years ago what the medical establishment has only recently come to accept.
And how many of those studies were funded by the institutions pushing the products being studied? This type of conflict-of-interest / research-funding is nothing new, cigarette companies arguably pioneered this practice decades before.
> But it's only in the last few years that the scope of the issue has really come to light.
Sure, because of a non-ignorable problem. I'm advocating for skepticism, investigative journalism, and research, rather than parroting what industry says is true. I'm seeking reporting, not cheap public-relations pieces.
Instead of waiting for a problem, how about we ask questions of how things might fail before it does.
Skepticism is all well & good, but it's not the place of news media to be blindly skeptical. This isn't about what turned out to be correct or incorrect, it's about whether any amount of reasonable due diligence by news media would have changed their reporting. And the available information at the time doesn't indicate that it would.
Of course hind sight is 20/20, but you assume that media was simply parroting, that they didn't look into available research and come up empty. Maybe some didn't, maybe some did, but the fact remains that if they did, they would have come up empty. If the medical establishment, those actually tasked with the type of skepticism you advocate for, didn't do their job, that's on them. It's not on the media to be able to predict the future. You are simply blindly repeating "They should have done something" when nothing in the historical record would have supported it.
If the research is biased, you'd have to start funding your own clinical trials to find the real answer, which is extremely expensive (and perhaps unethical for certain addiction questions, given that you might addict people).