Journalism and Global Health

Abstract

Looking to see how much coverage global health issues have received across American newspapers, we carried out a survey of news coverage in eight newspapers published over the past several decades. We also conducted two dozen interviews with the reporters and editors at those papers and elsewhere in journalism. The survey counted 1,200 data points, each one representing one year’s coverage of a single topic in one newspaper. We checked every story to be sure it was relevant—that it was substantially about the global health issue being reviewed, or contained a substantial discussion of that issue. All other stories, such as those that just mentioned a topic in passing (such as “diseases like avian flu”) were excluded from the counts. (See methods in Appendix 2.) We found that, even as American journalism has begun to suffer an historic decline, a new topic has made its way into routine coverage. The issues of global health now receive four times as much coverage as they did 10 years ago, and eight times as much as 20 years ago. These stories remain a small percentage of all the news, but they have become a small and steady part of routine coverage. A century ago, and even fifty years ago, there were few stories on the topic. Since the 1990s, the number of stories has increased to the point that the topic is recognized widely and even mid-sized American newspapers carry dozens of stories per year on global health issues.