Spanish-Language Television Coverage of Health News

Evaluating Health Storytelling in Spanish-Language Television from a Communication Infrastructure Theory Perspective

“…The articles failed to contextualize the health issues in a way that would empower the Latino community. Subervi-Vélez (1999) found that attempts by Spanish-language television news to show relevance is often limited to statements about how the community is at risk for the health problem; the news stories do not include references to Latino health advocacy groups, local community health resources, or any other significant Latino "protagonist." Our study advances these previous studies by examining the role of Spanish-language television as a community storyteller within the larger health storytelling network.…”

A Decade of Research on Health Content in the Media: The Focus on Health Challenges and Sociocultural Context and Attendant Informational and Ideological Problems

“…Notably, when research attended to a particular sociocultural group, studies often limited analyses to media with a principle readership of that group: 4 research about racial=ethnic groups looked at African American media (Hoffman-Goetz, 1999;Hoffman-Goetz et al, 1997;Johnson et al, 1999;Krishnan et al, 1997;Pickle et al, 2002;Stoddard et al, 1998;exceptions include Pratt & Pratt, 1996;, Hispanic=Latino media (Subervi-Vélez, 1999;Vargas & dePyssler, 1999;exceptions include Vargas, 2000), and Canadian Aboriginal media (Hoffman-Goetz et al, 2005;Hoffman-Goetz et al, 2003). Likewise, research focused on age-related issues and analyzed media targeted to specific age groups including prime-time television for children aged 2-11 (Byrd-Bredbenner et al, 2003), teen media (DuRant et al, 1997;Malone et al, 2002;Smith, 2005;Stern, 2005), and, aside from depictions of menopause, magazines popular among older readers (Kava, et al, 2002).…”

“…Research focused on illnesses typically found informational value to be wanting regardless of whether the evaluation was based on the scope of coverage, information provided, or the framing of the topic. First, surveys of journalistic media suggested that the scope of illnesses attended to in the media do not reflect prevalent health threats (e.g., Finnegan et al, 1999;Frost et al, 1997;Subervi-Vélez, 1999;Vargas, 2000;Vargas & dePyssler, 1999). For instance, in various magazine and news media, diabetes and HIV=AIDS received more coverage than cancer and cardiovascular disease (Hoffman-Goetz et al, 2003), reporting on various cancers does not reflect actual mortality rates (Hoffman-Goetz & MacDonald, 1999;5 Changes and processes related to reproductive health could have been included here, but it appears that their gendered nature trumps their status as chronic conditions; thus, they are discussed in the section on health politics.…”

Culture and Health Reporting: A Comparative Content Analysis of Newspapers in the United States and China

“…Initially, each news article in the sample was coded in terms of the general topics covered, including: diseases (e.g., cancer, HIV=AIDs, mental illnesses), risk factors (e.g., food safety, environmental risk), benefit factors (e.g., healthy diet and exercise), and other health topics (e.g., public health policy and law, health infrastructure, health education, scientific advancement, medical maltreatment). These health topics were generated based on the categorization of topics in existing studies on media coverage of health (e.g., Berry, WharfHiggins, & Naylor, 2007;Subervi-Velez, 1999;Z. Wang & Gantz, 2007).…”