A 'Dance' Toward Public Health

Cebu Press Freedom Week kicks of this week to remind both readers and journalists on the essential role that the press plays in the local community. Breakthroughs joins the celebration with an inside look of health and science journalism as practiced in a developed country like the United States. There is not much difference in certain ways.

LET us pause this week from hard medical science to join in the celebration of the Press Freedom Week. But don’t you know that health journalism is much like dancing?

The relationship between the journalist and his or her source is much like an ever-unfolding dance. A sweat-breaking ballroom dancing, you might say. The sources seek access to the journalist to get their findings across; the journalist seeks access to the sources to do his job. Nowadays, huge stores of authoritative sources are available especially through the Internet. But the latest ones are mostly scientific reports that are hardly understandable to the average reader.

The news media translates this hard info into “forms easily disseminated to and understood by the public,” says Sherrie Flynt Wallington of the Harvard School of Public Health (Boston, Massachusetts, USA).

Wallington and colleagues conducted a review on the health reporters and editors in the United States to get their source profiles and bases for framing their health reports. The Journal for Health Communication published their findings in January last year.

The team found out that journalists with a bachelor’s degree or less (compared to those with master’s degree or more) use... [Read more]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 21 September 2011.

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