Health news coverage in the U.S. media

Top Health News Topic Areas 

This report was released by The Kaiser Family Foundation and The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The purpose of this study is to take a broad look at how the news media covered one vital area — health and health policy — in 2007 and 2008. While there have been many studies that have taken a narrow look at news coverage of specific health issues (breast cancer, diabetes) or at coverage in one particular news medium (local television, print) this report takes a wider look at the broad spectrum of health issues, across a wide range of news media."

The report addresses the following questions:

• To what extent has health news been a part of the national news agenda?
• Which health topics get the most coverage?
• How does coverage vary from print to television, radio to on-line?
• And how big of an issue was health in coverage of the 2008 Presidential primary campaign?

The findings are based on an analysis of coverage of health in 48 different news outlets sampled as part of the ongoing News Coverage Index produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PE J) . This report covers an 18-month time period, from January 2007 though June2008. The study includes small, medium and large market newspapers, network TV morning and evening news programs, cable television news, news and talk radio, and on-line news. A total of 3,513 health stories were analyzed for this report. Two limitations of the sample are that it does not include local television news, and that its newspaper data includes front page stories only. At the same time, a major advantage of this study is that it analyzed news coverage every weekday (plus the Sunday newspapers) for a year and a half, rather than relying on a sample from a more limited time frame (e.g., one week’s worth of content).

The key findings include:

• Health news was the 8th biggest subject in the national news, comprising 3.6% of all coverage.
• Network evening news viewers were the most likely to find health news in their programming.
• Cable news, on the other hand, found very little room for health news, just 1.4% of programming studied. When the overall coverage of health was broken down, specific diseases such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease received the most coverage at 41.
• The single disease to get the most attention was cancer, accounting for 10.1% of all health coverage.
• The biggest individual health-related story was the debate over U.S. health care policies, which was the focus of 16.3% of all health news.

Despite ongoing debates in government about the future of our health care system, health did not become a dominant part of the 2008 primary campaign coverage. Whether focused on health policy or personal health issues, the subject accounted for less than 1% (.6%) of the campaign related news in the study.

View the entire report Health News Coverage in the U.S. Media January 2007 - June 2008