Quality in Health Journalism

Diagnosing Health Journalism?

Health journalism is becoming increasingly important. This is due especially to three developments: the health market is experiencing robust growth, few policy fields are as embattled as health policy, and many people are becoming more health-conscious. The media industry is reacting to these trends. For example, publishers are launching new magazines, daily newspapers are expanding their health advice reporting, and broadcasters such as ARD are devoting shows and weeklong special series to health issues.

When working on these formats, health journalists are confronted with numerous, partly contradictory expectations: readers, listeners, viewers, and Internet users expect them to convey comprehensible and useful information about how to prevent and treat diseases; publishers conceptualize new magazines and review how circulation and advertising sales develop; professional organizations expect health journalists to critically monitor and scrutinize health policy and health industry actors; the pharmaceutical companies’ PR professionals seek to place their messages in journalists’ reporting; researchers expect them to correctly present complex findings of medical studies; agencies such as Germany’s Federal Centre for Health Education hope that journalists will support their efforts toward health education and health promotion.

How can the quality of health journalism be secured in this web of interests? What are the consequences if media companies reduce editorial resources despite the increasing appreciation of health journalism while companies and trade associations continue to professionalize their public relations work? What are the impacts of the significant pressure to provide information in real time and the information available online becoming increasingly confusing? Which insights from mass communication and the practice of journalism help to determine quality in health journalism? The team at the Rudolf Augstein Endowed Professorship examined these questions for a number of years.

• In 2009, for example, they analyzed the invasive PR measures of the pharmaceutical industry and their consequences for journalism. These questions were studied in more depth at a conference on the relationship of journalism and PR which was organized by the team at the Rudolf Augstein Endowed Professorship in cooperation with Netzwerk Recherche e.V.
• In 2011, a major German publisher commissioned us to examine the quality of health reporting in selected newspapers it publishes; additional German newspapers were subsequently included in the analysis. Initial findings of this study were presented to experts in the field at the conference “Mediale Gesundheitskommunikation: Befunde, Entwicklungen und Herausforderungen eines interdisziplinären Forschungsfeldes” (“Health Communication in the Media: Findings, Developments, and Challenges of an Interdisciplinary Field of Research”) organized by the Netzwerk Gesundheitskommunikation (German only) in Munich in March 2012. Dennis Reineck summarized the results in his paper “Placebo oder Aufklärung mit Wirkpotenzial? Eine Diagnose der Qualität der Gesundheitsberichterstattung in überregionalen Tageszeitungen” (“Placebo or Information with Impact Potential? A Diagnosis of the Quality of Health Reporting in National Newspapers”) in our anthology (2014).
• Most recently, we worked on a major anthology on quality in health journalism with contributions by both communications scholars and health journalists. The book was published by Springer VS Verlag in the summer of 2014.
• Duration: 2009 — 2014
• Project director: Prof. Dr. Volker Lilienthal