Pew study: health-care reform coverage focused on politics, not system
Drawing by Flickr user caricaturas.
Health-care reform was the No. 1 story in the mainstream media from June 2009 to March 2010, when Congress passed legislation. So, how well did the press cover health-care reform?
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism examined more than 5,500 stories on health care during that period, trying to find out.
At least in terms of volume of coverage, the numbers were impressive. Before the debate over reform, coverage of health care accounted for less than 1 percent of overall coverage in 2007 and 2008, although ”the system affects virtually every American and represents about one-sixth of the U.S. economy.”
In the 10 months from 2009 to 2010, it jumped to 14 percent of newshole, ahead of the economy at 12 percent and Afghanistan at 6 percent.
Despite the increase in coverage, “a solid majority of Americans consistently said the health-care debate was hard to understand — a number that increased from 63 percent in July 2009 to 69 percent in December 2009, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center for the People & Press.”
Perhaps that’s because “the debate centered more on politics than the workings of the health-care system. Fully 41 percent of health-care coverage focused on the tactics and strategy of the debate, while various reform proposals filled another 23 percent. But only 9 percent of the coverage focused on a core issue — how our health-care system currently functions, what works and what doesn’t.”
In the message war, opponents’ terms appeared almost twice as often in the Nexis database of publications as supporters’ terms. ” The opponents’ attacks on government-run health care resonated more widely than the supporters’ attacks on the insurance industry,” Pew found.
You can read the full report here. And for tips on health-care reform stories to cover now in your community, check out this report on John Fairhall’s presentation at the recent IRE Conference. He is senior editor at Kaiser Health News.
Having followed the reform news, I am surprised that only 41% was focused on the politics; it certainly felt like a lot more than that. The stories on strategy and tactics certainly seemed to be more broadly presented.
Another aspect of the reporting was significant coverage of how the bill would hurt the already weak economy. This sort of news was definitely at the expense of coverage on how health care would change if reform was passed. In the end, the bill seemed to pass simply as a result of partisan efforts rather than on the basis of its contents – a sort of popularity contest if you will.