publications

BMSG's issue series
screen grab of journal article cover page

Studying the news on public health: How content analysis supports media advocacy

Sunday, November 30, 2003

In this article, published in the American Journal of Health Behavior, BMSG Director Lori Dorfman discusses how analyzing the news can help advocates find ways to garner media coverage for their issue and advance policy. Findings from BMSG’s research on how two public health issues have been portrayed in the news suggest ways that advocates can make themselves — and data — more readily available to reporters. The research also underscores how journalists can improve their reporting by expanding their list of sources, including more context in their work, and asking better questions based on epidemiology.

Issue 14: Making the case for paid family leave: How California’s landmark law was framed in the news

Saturday, November 01, 2003

On September 24, 2002, California made history as the first state in the nation to enact paid family leave. Issue 14 shows how the battle for paid family leave was framed by opponents and proponents in California and national news coverage. It also provides insights for both advocates and journalists as paid family leave moves into implementation in California and onto the public agenda in other states across the nation.

Food and beverage industry marketing practices aimed at children: Developing strategies for preventing obesity and diabetes [pdf]

Saturday, November 01, 2003

Public health professionals working to prevent childhood obesity want to know the best avenues of addressing food and beverage marketing aimed at children. This report looks at the relationship between the way foods and beverages are marketed to children and the rising trends in childhood overweight and explores strategies that might engage the food and beverage industry in reducing the marketing of unhealthy foods to children.

Issue 13: Distracted by drama: How California newspapers portray intimate partner violence

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Battered women’s advocates and feminist scholars have long complained about how intimate partner violence appears in the news. But because the evidence has been anecdotal, the extent that U.S. news media downplay violence against women has been difficult to gauge. Do most news stories blame the victim? Do they mitigate the perpetrator? Overall, how is intimate partner violence depicted in newspapers? We decided to find out by examining a year’s worth of articles in two major newspapers.

Voices for change: A taxonomy of public communications campaigns and their evaluation challenges [pdf]

Friday, November 01, 2002

The Communications Consortium Media Center in Washington DC commissioned this paper as part of a collaborative project designed to research, develop, test, and disseminate principles for evaluating nonprofit communications. The paper profiles various strategic communication campaigns that differ in purpose, scope, and maturity to identify the evaluation challenges each presents in its messy real-world context.

Youth violence stories focus on events, not causes

Sunday, September 01, 2002

A content analysis of three major California newspapers shows that routine coverage about youth crimes fails to provide context to help readers make sense of such events. This context should include the contributions to violent behavior that poverty, inadequate schools, discrimination, abuse, easy access to weapons, the over-commercialization of liquor, and other environmental factors make. Unreported, these elements have less chance of being understood and remedied.

Issue 12: American values and the news about children’s health

Thursday, August 01, 2002

The term “values” often acts as political shorthand, usually for the political agenda of social conservatives. Yet values systems are crucial to any political culture. How competing American value systems of individualism and what we call interconnection are represented in news stories will influence readers’ interpretations of the stories. The news about children’s health provides a useful lens for analyzing American values in the news since both conservative and progressive voices claim to “leave no child behind.”

Issue 11: Silent revolution: How U.S. newspapers portray child care

Tuesday, January 01, 2002

In an information economy dependent on education, child care brims with news value. But an analysis of national news on child care shows that is far from the case. Issue 11 compares every story about child care published on the business pages of 11 newspapers in 1999 and 2000 to child care stories in other parts of the same newspapers to see not only how frequent coverage is, but also how the stories are framed and who gets quoted the most within them.

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