Framing Federal School Nutrition Policy: The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in the Nation’s News

Abstract

The 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) represented a major and controversial overhaul of national nutrition standards for foods served in the United States’ nearly 100,000 public schools. To unpack how debate over this far-reaching policy was presented to the public, we examined 152 national print; network, network affiliate, and cable television; and public radio news stories about the policy, all appearing during the window surrounding its scheduled reauthorization (9/1/14–1/31/16). We found that HHFKA opponents were more likely to argue from a smaller set of frames that comprised a concise, clear narrative they frequently repeated, while proponents drew from a broader range of frames, each used less frequently, to present their position. In addition, key voices expected to be prominent in a debate over child health—children and parents—were relatively deemphasized. Overall, the primary frames on either side of this debate argued past one another, leaving largely unanswered critical charges about the role of government in assuring the public’s health. This debate reflects deeper arguments at the root of many public health policy decisions, and as such, is an illustrative case example for those planning how to enter and help shape national debate over public health policy.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Lori Dorfman and the Berkeley Media Studies Group for their contributions to the design of the study and feedback on earlier versions of this draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act had not been reauthorized as of this December 2017 writing.

2. Print opinion pieces included Editorials, Columns, Letters to the Editor, and Op-eds.

3. While we searched for stories on CNBC, we found none that met the criteria for substantive discussion of federal school foods policy and thus no CNBC stories are included in the final sample.

4. Print and television search terms are available upon request.

5. Stories excluded from the sample included those providing recommendations for packing school lunches at home, local initiatives or programs that were not linked to the federal policy, or stories that may have mentioned school foods in passing but which were substantively about topics such as a sugar tax, chemicals in food packaging, or diet-related health conditions.

6. All coding manuals are available, upon request.

7. Frames were counted as appearing in a news article no more than once, irrespective of the number of mentions of that frame within a given story or opinion piece.

8. Because of similarity in story length and structure, we present findings from newspapers and public radio together as ‘print.’

9. Story findings from local network affiliates are presented with findings from their respective national networks.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation under [Grant Number 72793].