publications

BMSG's issue series

Video: Testimony of Pamela Mejia: How the news portrays domestic violence

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

At an October 14, 2014, hearing of the California Assembly Select Committee on Domestic Violence, BMSG Senior Media Researcher Pamela Mejia speaks about the influence of news coverage on the public’s and policymakers’ understanding of domestic violence and how to address it.

Soda tax debates: An analysis of news coverage of the 2013 soda tax proposal in Telluride, Colorado

Thursday, October 09, 2014

In 2013, the small mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, proposed a penny-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks. Like two similar soda tax measures that came before it in Richmond and El Monte, California, the proposal failed. In this report, we analyze what arguments were made for and against the tax in the news, whose voices dominated the conversation, and how coverage of Telluride compared with that of Richmond and El Monte.

Food and beverage marketing to youth

Monday, September 29, 2014

What tactics are food and beverage companies using to target youth ‰— especially youth of color ‰— with marketing for unhealthy products? How do kids’ brains respond to seeing food ads and logos? Is industry self-regulation working? In this paper, BMSG’s Andrew Cheyne, Pamela Mejia, Laura Nixon and Lori Dorfman explore these questions and discuss implications for policy interventions.

Advertising unhealthy foods to children

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Despite the efforts of nutrition advocates and health educators, food and beverage companies are a major source of children’s education about food, and most of the marketing messages they receive are for unhealthy products. In this entry for the Encyclopedia of Health Communication, we provide an overview of food marketing to kids, its link to health inequities in communities of color, and the policy landscape for intervening.

Video: Engaging communications to create healthy environments

Thursday, September 04, 2014

In this July 23 presentation for the 2014 Colorado Health Symposium, BMSG Director Lori Dorfman discusses why health education and data don’t go far enough toward improving health at the population-level, and how communication, particularly media advocacy, can be used to change policy and create environments that better support health for everyone.

The debate on regulating menthol cigarettes: Closing a dangerous loophole vs freedom of choice

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Stoking fears of job loss and strategically positioning itself on the side of civil rights groups, the tobacco industry influenced news coverage of mentholated cigarettes ‰— which disproportionately impact the health of African Americans ‰— to prevent a ban on them, found researchers at BMSG and the Public Health Advocacy Institute in a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Video: Corporations, consumption and protecting public health

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes cause 7 out of every 10 deaths in the United States. In this video, BMSG’s Lori Dorfman and public health attorney Michele Simon join Nicholas Freudenberg, author of Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health, to discuss how the business practices of alcohol, tobacco, food and other industries are causing these illnesses and what tools, including policy, advocates can use to prevent them.

The origins of personal responsibility rhetoric in news coverage of the tobacco industry

Friday, April 18, 2014

To deflect blame for its products’ health harms, the tobacco industry consistently frames smoking as a personal issue rather than the responsibility of cigarette companies. A study from BMSG and our colleagues at the Public Health Advocacy Institute, published in the American Journal of Public Health, identifies when personal responsibility framing became a major element of the industry’s discourse and explores how its messages evolved over time to meet political and legal challenges.

Public health and media advocacy

Monday, March 24, 2014

Media advocacy can bolster public health practitioners’ efforts to advance social justice and work to solve some of our country’s most complex social and political issues. In this article, published in the American Review of Public Health, BMSG’s Lori Dorfman and Ingrid Daffner Krasnow discuss key components of media advocacy and offer tips for advocates, including framing pitfalls to avoid, ways to make data meaningful to broad audiences, and how to use compelling visuals to get a reporter’s attention.

Video: The power of the personal voice in media advocacy

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Effective storytelling is an important way for advocates to bring media attention to important public health issues. As the Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Program’s Genoveva Islas points out in this talk as part of BMSG’s 20th anniversary series, if public health advocates don’t tell their own stories, someone else will, but from a different perspective. Along with CCROPP’s Brandie Banks-Bey, Islas shares three steps that advocates can take to get better at articulating the problems in their communities and what can be done to address them.

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