Childhood obesity is on the rise, reaching epidemic proportions. Public health advocates have many mechanisms to arrest this trend, but are they getting the attention of policy makers through the news? To find out, Issue 10 analyzes two years of news coverage on childhood nutrition issues in California’s major newspapers.
This case study documents how journalists can be meaningfully engaged on this topic with people from public health despite typical barriers to access faced by public health practitioners and solid resistance from many editors and reporters. The authors describe goals, objectives, and activities across five daily newspapers along with journalists’ reactions, concerns, and resistance to the issues raised.
This report assesses findings from content analyses on crime news, investigating whether news coverage reflects actual crime trends; how news coverage depicts minorities and crime; and whether news coverage disproportionately depicts minority youth as perpetrators.
This handbook was created to help instructors infuse a data-driven approach into teaching journalism students how to report on violence.
These videos were developed as part of a project to educate journalists on how to apply a public health approach to reporting on crime and violence. They show the original and revised versions of a local newscast on youth homicide.
These videos were developed as part of a project to educate journalists on how to apply a public health approach to reporting on crime and violence. They show the original and revised versions of a local newscast on hate crimes.
These videos were developed as part of a project to educate journalists on how to apply a public health approach to reporting on crime and violence. They show the original and revised versions of a local newscast on a bomb threat.
In the week following the Columbine shootings, news reporting was so ubiquitous that it frightened students, teachers, and parents coast-to-coast — even though schools are one of the safest places for children to be. This Issue measures how reporting about more proximate and probable threats to California young people compares with coverage of dangers rare and remote.
Gun violence and its prevention were thrust onto the public’s agenda on April 20, 1999, with the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. But the shootings did not happen in a vacuum. In this Issue, we explore the context of gun policy debate in newspapers during the spring of 1999.
Some researchers have argued that communities are safer when more residents carry guns. But are they? Daniel Webster and Jens Ludwig examine the evidence put forth in various studies by John Lott and Gary Kleck to assess the question. Until proven otherwise, they write, the best science indicates that more guns will lead to more deaths.
