I’m currently a student at Boston University’s School of Public Health. Recently, in my Media Advocacy class, my professor posed an interesting question: Is the media hostile towards public health?
I went home and watched the evening news with this question in mind. What I saw led me to answer this question with a resounding YES.
That evening I watched a story about health care reform. The reporters spoke in an urgent and aggressive tone using strong adjectives. The major theme was not about improving the public health, but MONEY. In my opinion, the story was borderline scary.
Why is this?
EPISODIC VERSUS THEMATIC
Professor Mike Siegel of Boston University’s School of Public Health believes that the media’s hostility toward public health may be due to the fact that journalists take an episodic approach to capturing and disseminating stories. On the contrary, public health takes a thematic approach to sharing and examining information. The news is episodic in nature while the public’s health is thematic and ongoing.
The media advocacy textbook News for Change: An Advocates Guide to Working with the Media reminds readers that news is a business. Journalists are looking for stories that entertain as much as they are seeking to inform. This is why most public health stories about health reform, for example, are about the controversy, not the elements of primary prevention included in health reform legislation. This is also why stories about H1N1 are focused more on counterfeit Tamiflu than they are on hand washing.
So what can we do about this as health marking and communications professionals? We cannot change the way the reporters talk about public health, but we can change the way we pitch public health stories to the media. Hopefully, this can influence how these stories are framed. It’s a daunting task, but with collaboration, it may be just a bit more achievable.
Read More from Walking the Path:
New blog post: “The Media is No Friend of Public Health” http://twurl.nl/7y7r84 Agree, disagree? @PublicHealth, we’d love your take.
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @blueeyepath New blog post: “The Media is No Friend of Public Health” http://twurl.nl/7y7r84 Agree, disagree?
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Sounds like you just found yourself a great thesis topic to examine! Also–journalism wasn’t always a business. Sigh. It actually started as a public service–people use to write for free, for what they believed in, think Thomas Paine, etc. A great starting place for inspiration on this idea is Walter Williams’ “Journalist’s Creed.” But, I digress.
Best wishes with your studies and stay in touch. We need people like you.
New blog post: “The Media is No Friend of Public Health” http://twurl.nl/7y7r84
This comment was originally posted on Twitter