The role of the media in steering public opinion on healthcare issues

How do the media report cancer research? A study of the UK's BBC website

“…Recognised effects include informing audiences (Rees and Bath, 2000), agenda-setting, framing (Passalacqua et al, 2004) and persuading (Iyengar, 1997). There is now a substantial corpus of literature demonstrating the impact of media on shaping public opinion towards countries' health-care systems (Benelli, 2003;Collins et al, 2006), and how newspapers targeted at particular ethnic groups can vary in their approach (Hoffman-Goetz and Friedman, 2005). In addition, there have been studies of how health-related issues have been portrayed in the media around particular diseases (Brown et al, 2001), the uptake of health care and screening for cancer (Jones, 2004;Schroy et al, 2008), and pharmaceutical coverage (Cassels et al, 2003), particularly in certain media-conscious countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.…”

Resource Allocation in Health Care

“…The effect of bias in public opinion caused by emotional responses generated by a media that prefers sensationalist reporting to accurate presentaion of facts should not be underestimated, as shown by the Di Bella case in Italy (Benelli 2003). -It is important to encourage the public to think in terms of public interest as a whole, for the common good over and above the good of individualsEven public representation, when it exists, can present its own problems.…”

Health communication: press reporting - a case of the Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana

“…spremembe v medijih v zadnjih 20 letih kažejo v zmanjševanju specializiranih zdravstvenih revij, vse večji poudarek pa je na senzacionalizmu, namesto na točnosti informacij. V časopisih, revijah ter na televizijskih in radijskih programih so novice o medicini, zdravju in znanosti vedno bolj prisotne, vendar na način, ki je obratno sorazmeren s kritično funkcijo novinarjev (11). Da gre za resen pojav, potrjuje tudi dejstvo, da se problema zavedajo tudi sami novinarji in se tako ukvarjajo z vprašanjem neustreznega poročanja o zdravstvu.…”