When Medicine Meets Media: How Health News is Co-produced Between Health and Media Professionals

ABSTRACT

From the 1980s onwards, the biomedical sector has become intricately interwoven within academic, industrial, state, and media structures. Against a backdrop of biomediatization theory which conceptualizes the production of health news as a multi-sited process of co-production, rather than as a linear translation of biomedical knowledge from the hierarchically superior domain of biomedicine to the media, we provide a holistic interpretive framework for examining the production of health news. By means of in-depth elite interviews (N = 36) with CEOs and communications officers from a variety of health stakeholder organizations that often feature as news sources in health news, as well as with editors of leading media outlets in Belgium, this article finds that the inherent complexity of biomedicine constitutes a delicate context for finding reliable health news sources. Interestingly, and contrary to previous research, our results challenge health journalism’s assumed reverence for scientific authority. Second, the fierce struggle for attention in the new hybrid media environment, threatens news organizations’ financial viability thus inducing an unanticipated and unwanted difference in quality between free news and news behind a paywall which could further increase existing health inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Biomediatization
• biomedicalization
• health news
• hybrid media system
• sourcing
• qualitative interviews

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Joyce Stroobant http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1460-748X

Sarah Van den Bogaert http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5671-8642

Notes

1 One of the magazine interviews was a double interview. Upon request of the editor-in-chief of one magazine, the interviewee was accompanied by one of their senior health reporters due to language issues. Belgium is a largely bilingual French/Dutch country. This research focuses on the Dutch speaking part of Belgium (Flanders) but the magazine in question also publishes a French a version (which is not a literal translation of the Dutch version). Due to the fact that the editor-in-chief’s native language was French, she requested the support of a familiar native Dutch-speaker.

2 Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French as well as a small minority of German-speakers. As a consequence, Belgium does not have “national” media outlets. Since this study is situated in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, our focus is on the Flemish media market.

3 Complementary to the analysis presented here, the authors are working on a paper that explores how processes of biomediatization vary for the different stakeholders.

4 For more information on the coding strategy, coding schemes or Nvivo data files, please contact the first author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Special Research Fund [grant number BOFGOA 2014 000 604] “(De)constructing Health News”.