BMSG’s Lori Dorfman speaks at the 2016 UCLA-Harvard Food Law and Policy Conference: “Food Marketing to Children: The Current Reality and What Can Be Done.” As part of a panel discussion broadcast on C-SPAN, Dorfman discusses how food and beverage companies digitally target kids, the health and privacy concerns their tactics raise, and how we can help hold industry accountable.
In the summer of 2016, BMSG was honored to join the RYSE Center, along with a group of practitioners, researchers and community advocates in Richmond, California, to discuss the connections among racial oppression, white privilege, childhood trauma and health outcomes. This memo captures highlights from the group’s exploration of how racial justice can be positioned at the center of trauma-informed work.
One potential — but often overlooked — barrier to successful breastfeeding is the widespread marketing of infant formula. Infant formula marketers spend millions on direct-to-consumer advertising each year, exposing women to marketing in health care settings, retail stores, print ads and online. However, digital infant formula advertising is understudied and poorly understood. To help address this research gap, we’ve conducted a preliminary analysis of how infant formula is marketed through social media.
Historically, the infant formula industry has focused heavily on health care provider-directed marketing to reach new mothers. Now, it also seeks to engage women with an ever-expanding range of direct-to-consumer marketing tactics that include traditional marketing on television, coupons, elaborate websites, rewards programs, infant feeding advice hotlines, social media marketing and product packaging. This memo provides a preliminary overview of consumer protection policies that govern infant formula marketing and related self-regulation and international codes of conduct.
BMSG’s recent analysis of how soda tax debates are characterized in the news revealed that oral health professionals seldom appear. By elevating their expert voices, oral health practitioners can contribute new and salient arguments for soda taxes to the public discourse and help advance public policy that improves oral health outcomes. In this journal article for the California Dental Association, we propose media advocacy strategies that oral health professionals can use to increase their visibility in the news to make the case for soda taxes.
It will be easier to make the big changes our communities need to prevent violence if we change the narrative around it and make prevention a visible part of the conversation. In this report, Berkeley Media Studies Group, in partnership with the Prevention Institute and with support from the Northern California Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit Department, explores news portrayals of community violence and makes recommendations for how to shift one piece of the discourse — the news media — to elevate prevention and multi-sector collaboration.
Media representations play a crucial role in informing public and policy opinions about the causes of, and solutions to, ill-health. This paper, co-authored by BMSG’s Lori Dorfman and published in BMC Public Health, reviews studies analyzing media coverage of non-communicable disease debates, focusing on how the industries marketing commodities that increase disease risk are represented.
In October 2015, the Center for Climate Change and Health convened a group of 20 health and communication experts to discuss how past health communication campaigns can inform work on climate change. This summary of that workshop, which was developed with consultation from BMSG’s Lori Dorfman, includes insights from tobacco control, obesity prevention, media advocacy and health equity communications. It also features recommendations for policy-change goals, research, framing and messaging.
This case study from the Vision Zero Network, which aims to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, examines the communication approaches that San Francisco and New York City have used to frame traffic deaths as preventable and foster both individual and institutional change. The case study includes contributions and insights from BMSG’s Pamela Mejia on the media’s role in influencing the public’s and policymakers’ perceptions of the issue.
Public health officials often view food companies as legitimate partners in improving population health, even as they eschew interactions with the tobacco and alcohol industries. In this journal article for Frontiers in Public Health, BMSG’s Lori Dorfman, along with colleagues from the U.S., U.K. and Germany, explore why this is the case, in spite of significant health harms associated with all three industries. They also make recommendations for steps that public health researchers can take to reduce harmful corporate influences on health.
