(Dis)entangling medicine and media: a qualitative analysis of the relationship between the fields of healthcare and journalism

ABSTRACT

Previous research has illustrated that journalists play an active role in the production of health news. The current study explores the relationship between the fields of healthcare and journalism from a healthcare perspective. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of fields and Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work, this study employed elite interviewing to analyse how the relations between these two fields were reflected and negotiated in the discourses of Belgian health-policy stakeholders.

Our analysis illustrated that health-policy stakeholders perceived medicine and the news media as two different cultures and, therefore, discursively positioned news media actors as outsiders. Additionally, we showed that the nature of the relationship between health-policy stakeholders and the news media was linked to health-policy stakeholders’ position within the healthcare field. Through this analysis, we illustrate the value of using the concept of boundary-work as an analytical instrument to study the relationships between fields.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• news media
• field
• boundary-work
• stakeholders
• healthcare

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the organisations and anonymous representatives who were willing to act as interviewees. For helping us to have access to these organisations, we have Thierry Christiaens and Marc Bogaert to thank. We are also grateful to all the members of the Health, Media & Society research centre, and special thanks go to Henk Roose for sharing his insights on field theory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

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

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

Notes

1 Sickness fund agencies are non-profit private health insurance organisations which collect health insurance contributions. Within social health insurance systems, health insurance is organised through these organisations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University [grant number BOF14-GOA-014].