Health and medicine are major topics of news coverage, but research on health and medical reporting has remained mainly confined to specialist subfields, with less impact on broader academic fields, ...including journalism studies, than would seem warranted by its importance. This article argues that assumptions implicit in much of this literature have limited the development of a wider tradition of research on health journalism. We point particularly to what we call the linear-reflectionist perspective, which sees health journalism as an often-flawed mechanism for transmitting pre-existing medical knowledge to the mass public. We propose an alternative framework that seeks to illuminate the complexity and importance of this field of study.
This comment focuses both on issues related to comparative analysis of media systems, and to issues related to immigration, specifically. It explores the implication of findings on the prevalence of ...human interest framing in immigration coverage for comparative analysis, suggesting that it may be too simplistic to assume that commercialization is always associated with human interest framing, particularly in coverage of marginalized populations. It also explores the complexity of public opinion on immigration, and issues about how to understand the role of media over time in the evolution of public opinion.
Human-interest narratives are journalistic tools to captivate and engage the audience, influence public opinion and bring revenue to media organizations. This paper analyses how human-interest ...narratives are used in contemporary health journalism across media systems and health systems. Based on a comparative content analysis of Norwegian, Spanish, U.K. and U.S. newspapers (2016–2017), it studies how human-interest stories are contextualized, health problems explained and responsibility attributed. The article reveals a complex picture of the role of human-interest stories in health coverage. In line with expectations, the study finds that human-interest stories do tend to emphasize individual biomedical treatment of illness and to privilege idealized victims who fit the routines of dominant media dramaturgy. In contrast to theories that consider personalization of news as an individualization of responsibility and dumbing down of public debate, however, the study finds that human-interest narratives are also used to explain health as a structural phenomenon and a collective responsibility, appealing to political intervention and accountability of health authorities. Such claims are more prominent in European human-interest health stories and less frequent in the more strongly commercialized U.S. health and media system.
This article examines historical trends in the reporting of health and medicine in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune from the 1960s to the 2000s. It focuses on the extent to which health ...reporting can be said to have become increasingly politicized, or to have shifted from treating the production of medical knowledge as something belonging to a restricted, specialized sphere, to treating it as a part of the general arena of public debate. We coded a sample of 400 stories from the two newspapers for four different Implied Audiences which health stories can address: Scientific/Professional, Patient/Consumer, Investor and Citizen/Policymaker. Stories were also coded for the origin of the story, the sources cited, the presence of controversy, and the positive or negative representation of biomedical institutions and actors. The data show that through all five decades, news reporting on health and medicine addressed readers as Citizen/Policymakers most often, though Patient/Consumer and Investor-oriented stories increased over time. Biomedical researchers eclipsed individual physicians and public health officials as sources of news, and the sources diversified to include more business sources, civil society organizations and patients and other lay people. The reporting of controversy increased, and portrayals of biomedicine shifted from lopsidedly positive to more mixed. We use these data in pinpointing how media play a constitutive role in the process of “biomedicalization,” through which biomedicine has both extended its reach into and become entangled with other spheres of society and of knowledge production.
•Documents historical trends in newspaper coverage of health and medicine.•Reports content analysis of newspaper health coverage over five decades.•Proposes method for coding implied audience of health stories.•Assesses the integration of health discourse into the public sphere.•Explores the role of news media in the process of biomedicalization.
Based on a standardized operationalization of the watchdog, civic, interventionist, loyal-facilitator, infotainment, and service roles, this study combines survey (N = 643) and content analysis data ...(N = 19,908) to explain gaps between newspaper journalists’ role conceptions and the performance of their press organizations in nine countries from Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia. Taking an institutional approach by focusing on institutional influences on the conception–performance gap at three levels (individual, organizational, societal), our results show that these gaps are largest for the two roles most connected with the public functions of journalism, the civic, and the watchdog roles. Multilevel analyses offer significant evidence on that, across all six analyzed roles, the size of the gaps differed more clearly between journalists and between media organizations, than among countries. Although influences on an individual level (i.e., perceived autonomy) have some explanatory power, influences on the organizational level and, more specifically, ownership and codified editorial policies are the factors that best explain conception–performance gaps. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the public skepticism about the performance of journalism and the media.
This article presents a comparative content analysis of the US and French national press in the 1960s and 1990s to test hypotheses about the influence of media structure on journalistic discourse. ...The US and French press are presented as strongly contrasting models, with the US press more commercialized, and the French press more closely tied to the political field. Using a variety of story- and paragraph-level content indicators, this studyshows that the French press (Le Monde and Le Figaro) offers relatively more critical coverage, a greater representation of civil society viewpoints, a stronger emphasis on both the ideological and strategic ‘game’ aspects of politics, and a higher proportion of interpretation and opinion mixed with factual reporting. Representing the US national press, The New York Times is shown to ‘index’ its coverage more closely to political elite viewpoints. Despite globalizing pressures, French-US differences have not diminished over time.
Journalistic Role Performance in Times of COVID Hallin, Daniel C.; Mellado, Claudia; Cohen, Akiba ...
Journalism studies (London, England),
12/2023, Letnik:
24, Številka:
16
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper examines journalistic role performance in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a content analysis of newspaper, television, radio and online news in 37 countries. We test a set of ...hypotheses derived from two perspectives on the role of journalism in health crises. Mediatization theories assume that news media tend to sensationalize or to politicize health crises. A contrasting perspective holds that journalists shift toward more deferential and cooperative stances toward health and political authorities in a health crisis, attempting to mobilize the public to act according to the best science. Hypotheses derived from these perspectives are tested using the standard measures of journalistic roles developed by the Journalistic Role Performance Project. Results show that the deference/cooperation/consensus perspective is better supported, with media moving away from the Watchdog and Infotainment, and toward performance of the Service and Civic roles. We also explore differences in the pattern by country.
This article explores the relationship between political clientelism and the development of media systems in southern Europe and Latin America, considering the cases of Greece, Italy, Spain, ...Portugal, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. Common characteristics of the media systems in these countries include low newspaper circulation, a tendency towards political instrumentalization of the media, limited development of journalism as a differentiated and autonomous profession, and regulatory agencies that are at the same time party-politicized and relatively weak. We argue that these media-system characteristics must be understood in relation to a broader history of political clientelism - though a number of forces, including commercialization of media industries and globalization, have tended in recent years to undermine clientelistic relationships.
Studies suggest that, at the routine level, news beats function as unique “micro-cultures.” Exploring this “particularist” approach in news content, we compare how the interventionist, watchdog, ...loyal, service, infotainment, and civic roles materialize across 11 thematic news beats and analyze the moderating effect of platforms, ownership, and levels of political freedom on journalistic role performance in hard and soft news. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 news items from 37 countries. Our results reveal the transversality of interventionism, the strong associations of some topics and roles, and the limited reach of news beat particularism in the face of moderating variables.
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