The Health Buck Stops Where? Thematic Framing of Health Discourse to Understand the Context for CVD Prevention

Abstract

Using a constructed week methodology, we analyzed media summaries for the type of health discourse (health care delivery, disease-specific prevention, lifestyle risk factors, public/environmental health disease, social determinants of health) portrayed over a 5-year period as a means of describing the context within which health staff worked to prevent heart disease in one Canadian province. The results reveal that heart disease received very little media coverage, despite provincial health data revealing it to be the leading cause of mortality, morbidity, and health care costs. Coverage of the health care system dominated the media landscape over the 5-year period. The study findings also suggest that the health discourses in the media summaries were represented as primarily thematic, rather than as episodic narratives, relieving any one level of government as entirely responsible for the health of its constituents. Media advocacy strategies may be a means to redress the imbalance of health discourses presented by the media.

Still a burning issue: trends in the volume, content and population reach of newspaper coverage about tobacco issues

“…A search on Factiva for Australian news items published in five major Australian daily newspapers containing the word 'obesity' found that the volume of coverage had risen from 67 in 1996 to 1416items in 2006(Personal communication, CMF Bonfiglioli, 27 June 2007. A study of US news on this topic found a greater than fourfold increase (Kim and Willis 2007), and an examination of 5 years of news coverage in one Canadian province found that reporting of physical activity, nutrition, and obesity combined overtook coverage of tobacco in 2003 (Wharf Higgins et al 2006). While our study did not permit direct comparison of the volume of each, we observed that tobacco issues have continued to be newsworthy up until 2006, and up until 2005 they had a consistent prominence.…”

Public Health Framing of News Regarding Childhood Obesity in the United States

“…Gruhn and Hawkins (2004) described a successful collaborative program involving journalism educators, newspaper publishers, and a private funding agency seeking to accomplish that goal by encouraging the adoption of a public health frame in reporting children's health problems. Higgins et al (2006) recommended that health advocates take better advantage of media outlets to press their messages. After Men's Health magazine identified Houston as the "Fattest City in the U.S.," Houston mayor Bill White organized the "Get Moving Houston" fitness campaign in 2005 (www.getmovingHouston.com).…”

“…Kim, Scheufele, and Shanahan (2002) referred to frames as "easy-to-understand interpretive packages" (p. 8) that lead audience members to draw different conclusions about causality or responsibility based on the same or very similar factual content. Higgins, Naylor, Berry, O'Connor, and McLean (2006) echoed this sentiment in their contention that through framing employed in news stories, "Media are key sources in defining importance and relevancy of health issues giving meaning to health issues and shaping public perceptions of who is responsible for solutions and hence . .…”

“…Some scholars have identified examples of news framing that may promote positive behavior or policy change (e.g., Nathanson, 1999). Conversely, there are other examples of news framing that fail to achieve that end (e.g., Gruhn & Hawkins, 2004;Sandberg, 2007), and still others where the outcome is unclear (Higgins, et al, 2006;Lawrence, 2004).…”

“…In terms of how framing of responsibility for obesity has changed over time, their findings revealed that while there was a trend toward increased reference to societal factors associated with obesity, personal causes and solutions were still identified much more frequently than those attributed to society. Higgins et al (2006) utilized Iyengar's (1994 notion of thematic versus episodic framing of health discourse in news in one Canadian province regarding the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Thematic frames focus on collective accountability, whereas episodic frames hold affected individuals to account.…”