Newspaper coverage of childhood immunisation in Australia: a lens into conflicts within public health

Abstract

Public health efforts to lift childhood vaccination rates can be supported or undermined by media representations of parents. Polarising representations neglect the large range of ‘middle-ground’ positions people occupy, potentially alienating parents. In recent years, Australian public health actors have tried to better engage journalists to avoid this. As these efforts have unfolded, the main national immunisation policy lever has become more punitive. This paper examines whether Australian newspaper representations of parents have changed, by comparing 153 newspaper articles from two periods: 1997–1998 (prior to the development of a public health lobby targeting the media; when the first national childhood immunisation policy was introduced) and; 2015–2016 (5 years after advocacy groups began working with the media; and when the national policy took a punitive turn). We analyse patterns and shifts (between 1997–1998 and 2015–2016) in the portrayal of parents as complacent, alternative, hesitant and as choosing. Australian newspaper portrayals of parents are broadly aligned with the policy targets of the day. In 2015–2016, there was less negative representation of parents who occupy the ‘middle-ground’ between vaccine acceptance and rejection. However, coverage of alternative parents (vaccine objectors) intensified in quantity and negativity. Concurrently, there were new (minority) portrayals of vaccine objectors as invisible, and as victims being denied choice. This signals that reporting may simultaneously align with national policy targets and destabilise public health efforts to avoid polarising misrepresentations of parents, characterisations likely to undermine trust in public health. Rather than ‘blame the media’, this analysis illuminates conflicts within public health.

Keywords:

• Childhood vaccination
• media representations
• public health policy

Notes

1. State support for Australian families is in the form of welfare payments called ‘tax benefits A and B’ (rather than tax credits or tax breaks which alter regular take-home pay). In 2013, about 2/3rds of Australian children were being raised in families receiving tax benefits A and/or B. Of these, 35% received the full amount and 18% received the ‘base rate’ (around 1.6k) of Family Tax A (the larger of the 2 benefits) with the remainder on sliding scale between, dependant on family income (Whiteford & Crosby, 2015).

2. The Factiva database has the most comprehensive coverage of Australian newspaper archives from 1997 to 2016. However, it only includes the Sunday or weekend editions of three of the five newspapers selected (not for The Sydney Morning Herald/ The Sun-Herald and The Age/Sunday Age). Thus, two additional searches were conducted with the Proquest database to capture 1997–1998 and 2015–2016 coverage in The Sun-Herald and Sunday Age.