Why Do Journalists Ignore Nurses?

And what are we going to do about it?

We’ve all seen the stories in print or watched the video clips:

  • In a story about a hospital’s response to a disaster, the hospital administrator and/or a physician describe the actions of the staff, while behind them one can see nurses rushing about.
  • In a story about patient survival after a harrowing event, it’s the physician alone who is interviewed about the patient’s care and recovery.

Nurses—and nursing’s role—are made invisible; our contributions are devalued, relegated to little more than a backdrop for most stories about health care or news involving delivery of services. And yet we all know that nurses were intimately involved in the event and outcomes. In ignoring nurses’ experiences and perspectives, health care coverage perpetuates nursing’s invisibility and ignores nursing’s central role in health care.

A replication study reports little progress after 20 years.

In the October issue, Diana Mason and colleagues present their report of a study they conducted as an adjunct to their recent replication of the 1997 Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media. In the replication study,

” . . . nurses were identified as sources in only 2% of health news stories in the same print publications investigated in the earlier study, showing no improvement […]

2018-10-08T10:41:16-04:00October 8th, 2018|Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Getting Nursing News (Whether You Like It Or Not)

By Gail M. Pfeifer, AJN news director

During a recent public radio interview between Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former senior advisor to President Obama, and Republican strategist Frank Luntz (author of Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear), Dunn remarked that folks “increasingly seek people they already agree with to get their news from.” (Here’s the show’s transcript.)

That is a sad commentary on the state of news journalism today. By definition, a journalist’s report should be fair and unbiased. And news reporting, above all, should be held to that high standard.

If you read AJN’s news department regularly (here’s the current issue’s table of contents; scroll down to find links to the new articles), and we hope you do, we should tell you how we try to maintain such standards. […]

2016-11-21T13:12:44-05:00June 10th, 2011|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Wrapping Up the Health Care Journalists’ Meeting with Sebelius, Frieden, Pronovost, and Others

By Shawn Kennedy, interim editor-in-chief

So I got back from the Association of Health Care Journalists conference in Chicago and a colleague asked, “How was the meeting?” I automatically said it was “good.” But then, I started to think about why I said that and what I’d found valuable—in brief, it’s networking and gaining new information.

I was looking for new information about the latest health issues—mostly about how the experts see health reform shaping up—and about any new issues or initiatives in health reporting. I attended sessions on how the new health reform legislation will affect hospitals (see my recent post on this) as well as state and local health agencies—but there were also presentations on monitoring food safety, lessons learned from H1N1, guidelines for writing about health guidelines, and patient safety advocacy; the new CDC director launched a report on state tobacco use (another post); and I watched a challenging but fascinating primer on health insurance financing from an actuary.

Some things I found worth noting:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying she will not stand by while some health insurance companies attempt to deny claims and push breast cancer patients off their plans. She commented, “It will be hand-to-hand combat if they try.” (See Reuters report for full story.)

Tom Frieden (CDC director) saying that increasing tobacco taxes is the single most effective tool to reduce tobacco use. (Yet taxes in South Carolina have been seven cents since 1977!)

Aida Giachello from the Midwest Latino Health […]

2016-11-21T13:18:02-05:00April 27th, 2010|health care policy|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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