Measuring news impact on public understanding of health policy: An agenda for research

Health experts and many health journalists acknowledge that, to make good health decisions, consumers need information about costs, benefits, harms and the quality of supportive evidence regarding medical interventions. Similarly, citizens' and policymakers' decisions about whether to support health policy proposals should be informed by the best available data on how much such proposals would cost individual citizens and the government, who is likely to benefit and how much, who will be harmed by the policy and to what extent, and what kind of evidence suggests that the policy will have its intended effect. However, little research has examined the quality of journalists' coverage of health policy proposals, and even less has attempted to demonstrate how the inclusion or exclusion of information such as costs, benefits, harms and so forth influences citizen understanding of and support for these policies. Using a thematic literature review approach, this article discusses the research on news coverage of health policy, focusing on the public's need for policy information and the types of coverage news media provide. Based on this review, I argue that the coverage often fails to provide audiences with information that could help them make better decisions about local, state and national health policy proposals. The article proposes a set of criteria for assessing health policy coverage and offers an agenda for future research in this area, with the goal of improving understanding of how news coverage affects public and policymakers' health policy decision making.