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 […]