Media Coverage of Health IssuesCoverage of Abortion in Select U.S. Newspapers
Section snippets
Background
A long history of communications research illuminates the power of the news to set public and policy agendas. Agenda-setting theory posits a positive relationship between the amount of news coverage given to an issue and the public's perception of that issue's importance (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Many studies have concluded that news coverage is one of the most powerful predictors of public opinion and, by extension, national and local policy agendas (Rogers et al., 1993, Son and Weaver, 2006).
Of
Methods
To assemble the sample for content analysis, we searched the Nexis database for stories containing the word “abortion” in three major U.S. newspaper sources: The New York Times, the newspaper with the highest paid circulation in the United States1
Results
The 2013 sample was split fairly evenly between the three news sources: 36% from the Washington Post, 34% from The New York Times, and 30% from the Associated Press. The 2016 sample was dominated by the Washington Post, with 53% of pieces, followed by 25% in the Associated Press and 22% in The New York Times. This finding likely reflects a changed business model at the Post after its acquisition by Jeff Bezos in late 2013, leading to an expanded online news presence with more rapid publication
Discussion
Our study finds that, despite being a critical health service for women, abortion is not typically covered in U.S. newspapers as a health issue. Rarely included are facts that would help the public to understand the context of abortion as a safe and common health care service.
In fact, not only is abortion not portrayed as a common women's health issue, most of the time it is in the news, it is not discussed in depth at all. In this study, abortion in the news primarily serves as a political or
Conclusions
This study illuminates important themes in U.S. news coverage of abortion. Newspaper coverage of abortion does not support a public understanding of the issue as a common, safe reproductive health care service. Abortion appears in public discourse as a political issue more than a health issue. Women themselves rarely appear in news coverage of abortion, and when they do, their abortion stories do not reflect typical patients’ experiences of abortion in this country. If, as communications
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Diana Greene Foster for research support and helpful comments on early drafts, Debbie Nyugen for coding and administrative support, Lauryn Claassen for coding, Andrew Cheyne for sampling guidance, and Lori Dorfman for helpful comments on early drafts. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose feedback materially improved this work.
Katie Woodruff, MPH, DrPH, is a Public Health Social Scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research explores public discourse and public policy on maternal and reproductive health in the United States.
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2023, Health (United Kingdom)Constructing the abortion debate: a comparative news values analysis of print media discourses in Ireland and Argentina
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Katie Woodruff, MPH, DrPH, is a Public Health Social Scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research explores public discourse and public policy on maternal and reproductive health in the United States.
Funding for this research was provided by The Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation, and the author was partially supported by National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) grant #T32 AA007240, “Graduate Training in Alcohol Problems: Alcohol-Related Disparities.” The funders had no involvement in study design, collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing of this work.
Preliminary findings from earlier versions of this work were reported at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, November 17, 2014, and the annual meeting of the National Abortion Federation in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 23, 2017.
The author was a consulting researcher at ANSIRH/UCSF when this work was conducted.
Present address: University of California, San Francisco, Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, 1330 Broadway, Suite 1100, Oakland, CA 94612. Permanent phone number: +1-510-986-8990.