Visuals’ function in health risk reporting: juxtaposing the academic conceptualisations with journalistic perceptions

Abstract

Given the scholarly neglect of visuals in health risk reporting, it remains unclear what types of visuals predominate in news coverage and why journalists choose to use them. Generating knowledge on this neglected part of journalistic work should facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of health risk reporting and its impact on society. In 2020 we conducted two studies with this goal in mind: a content analysis of visuals in the coverage of a recent E. coli outbreak in Germany (N = 200) and a survey of German health journalists (N = 49). Study 1 showed that visuals were mostly used to illustrate the presumed causes of the outbreak and recommended treatments. Study 2 presented visuals epitomising each of the frame functions identified in Study 1 to health reporters and asked for their views. Our findings revealed that journalists preferred images that involve health severity, medical aspects, and reassurance, but said that they disliked thematic and uncertainty frames. They reported using multiple visuals to fulfil several framing functions. Finally, Study 2 exposed important differences between journalists’ perceptions of visuals’ functions and the way scholars typically conceive them. Taken together, these studies suggest that health risk reporting may be better than its reputation, and that incorporating visuals into assessments of journalistic quality may challenge the typical criticism in a way impossible when merely evaluating the verbal component of news.

Keywords:

• Visuals
• images
• health risk
• health news
• health journalism
• framing

Acknowledgements

Daniela Dimitrova was a CAS Visiting Fellow at the LMU Munich when this research was conducted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For instance, previous verbal research suggested that sources of contamination are not often addressed in news texts (Nucci et al., 2009).

2. For a recent discussion of the theory-status of framing and a delineation of the key stages in the process of maturation, see, Dan and Ren (2021), p. 201–202.

3. Judging from the information provided on the websites of the seven outlets analysed in Study 1, each outlet published reports authored by about 5 to 12 journalists affiliated with the health beat. Thus, assuming a total population of at least 35 and at most 84 health journalists affiliated with these outlets, our 49 participants represent almost 60% of the most generous estimate of 84 journalists in total.

4. Specifically, the following Cronbach’s α scores were obtained. For the problem-definition frames: health severity = .87, human interest = .88, economic consequences = .70; for the causal-interpretation frames: episodic = .79, thematic = .73, medical = .88; for the treatment-recommendation frames: episodic = .80, thematic = .80, medical = .77; for the moral-evaluation frames: uncertainty = .90, alarmist = .89, reassurance = .74.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the LMU Munich, through an internal grant awarded to Viorela Dan (LMUMentoring).