News for a Change provides step-by-step instructions for public health advocates working with the media to promote social change. The book provides a guide to media advocacy — the strategic use of mass media to advance policies that improve health.
The lines of debate on child care are drawn between the personal responsibility of parents to provide for their own families and the role of the government or other institutions in helping meet this vital need. In Issue 7, we analyze this tension in five years of child care news and opinion.
Once viewed primarily as a criminal justice problem, violence and its prevention are now often claimed by public health professionals as being within their purview. After reviewing 282 articles published in public health and medical journals from 1985 through 1995 that discussed violence as a public health problem, the author found a tension between public health professionals’ vision of the social precursors of violence and their attempts to apply a traditional set of remedies.
Youth Radio is dedicated to bringing the voices of youth to young and adult audiences. This is a story of young people using radio to create their own representations as a mechanism for violence prevention.
Violence is a perplexing and multi-dimensional problem, about which the public remains largely misinformed. TV news is important to violence prevention because it heightens awareness of the issue and because it is the most consumed news source. This article examines whose voice is represented in local TV news stories about youth and violence.
The leading environmental threat to children’s health is lead poisoning. This Issue assesses the claims made by various sides of the issue during 1993 and 1994 in the nation’s major newspapers.
Alcohol is infrequently mentioned in the news. The occasional portrayals rarely depict problems or prevention, instead reinforcing the idea that alcohol is part of the good life or, at best, neutral. Substantive alcohol stories that do appear often report on research or advocacy. Researchers could, and should, have a stronger presence in the news.
In the late 1990’s, children’s health began to receive more attention in the news media. But was the coverage meaningful? In this Issue, we find out by examining three months of coverage from newspapers and National Public Radio.
Knowing that the media can be very powerful in shaping how voters perceive social issues, BMSG analyzed news coverage of Houston’s Proposition A and other affirmative action issues during the fall of 1997.
In September 1993, a small but dedicated group of prevention advocates in Oakland, Calif., had the alcohol industry running scared. This Issue describes how the coalition used media advocacy successfully in its four-year struggle to rectify the over concentration of alcohol outlets in Oakland.
