Mass Media and Health

Examining Media Impact on Individuals and the Health Environment

Kim Walsh-Childers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317406907
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Mass Media and Health: Examining Media Impact on Individuals and the Health Environment covers media health influences from a variety of angles, including the impact on individual and public health, the intentionality of these effects, and the nature of the outcomes. Author Kim Walsh-Childers helps readers understand the influence that mass media has on an individual's health beliefs and, in turn, their behaviors. She explains how public health policy can be affected, altering the environment in which a community's members make choices, and discusses the unintentional health effects of mass media, examining them through the strategic lens of news framing and advocacy campaigns.

Written for students across a variety of disciplines, Mass Media and Health will serve as primary reading for courses examining the broader view of mass media and health impacts, as well as providing supplemental reading for courses on health communication, public health campaigns, health journalism, and media effects.

CHAPTER 1

THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT, U.S. HEALTH AND THE MEDIA–HEALTH EFFECTS MATRIX

When my alarm clock goes off in the morning, I wake to the sounds of my local National Public Radio station’s morning news show. While fixing myself a cup of tea, I frequently turn on my laptop so that I can check my work and home email accounts. If a major news event was breaking the previous night, I may check CNN.com, my local newspaper’s website or Twitter to get the latest updates. If my schedule permits, I may check my Facebook page to see what friends have posted. If I go for a run, walk or bike ride, my smartphone comes with me.

On my drive to work, I pick up the print copy of my local newspaper and listen to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on the car radio. At the end of the day, I’ll tune in again on the way home, or perhaps I’ll listen to music – either on the radio or via my iPod. If I stop at the grocery store, I’ll have time to read the cover blurbs on the magazines while standing in the check-out line. At home, there are books and magazines to read, or I watch a TV show or stream a movie through my sons’ Wii console. After dinner, I’m likely to be back at the computer, checking the news again, making travel reservations or shopping, paying bills electronically, responding to email, searching for information I need either for work or for my family, uploading readings to an e-learning site for my students, perhaps posting to Facebook.

While other individuals’ specific interactions with mass media will differ from mine, most of us share this basic reality. In much of the world today, people live media-saturated lives. A 2013 report from the University of Southern California’s Institute for Communication Technology Management predicted that by 2015, average daily media use per person in the United States would equal 15.5 hours per day – not including media consumption at work (Short, 2013). Assuming an eight-hour working day for most people and at least six hours’ sleep, that figure gives “multimedia” a whole new meaning. Many of us, during at least some part of our day, are interacting simultaneously with multiple media channels.

The notion that the average person will soon spend substantially more than half of every day interacting with some sort of media raises significant questions about how so much media consumption affects us, both individually and as a society. Surely we should expect numerous impacts – economic, political, intellectual, sociological. However, the more specific focus of this book is on how interaction with media affects our health, including both media’s effects on our individual health behaviors and on the health environments in which we live. To illustrate, let me return for a moment to my daily media routine.

When NPR wakes me up in the morning, I generally turn it off before I’m awake enough to process any news story that may be running at that moment. But as I head downstairs to make tea, I clip my Fitbit to my pajamas to start monitoring my steps for the day. As soon as I sit down in front of my laptop, it will automatically sync to my account, and, if I choose, I can log in to see how well (or poorly) I’ve met my activity goals for the week. Email may bring updates about recent health or health policy research or events, or a prayer request from my pastor may inform me about a health problem someone in my church is experiencing. Even if there’s no health information in the emails themselves, advertising surrounding my home email account encourages me to check out some new supplement described as the “holy grail for weight loss” or to see what “amazing” new discovery Dr. Oz is touting on TV.

A check of CNN.com (in mid-September 2015) offers me the “Restaurant report card grades on antibiotics in meat supply,” providing information about how the use of antibiotic-laden meat from restaurants like McDonald’s or Denny’s may be contributing to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The entertainment section updates the story of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender change. My local newspaper’s website reports that my county is part of a pilot program aimed at improving coordination of area mental health services. At home, National Geographic’s October 2015 issue includes a story about the health risks its story-tellers often face, from being run over by hippos or elephants, attacked by sharks or abducted by guerilla fighters, to being bitten by venomous snakes or by swarms of sand-flies that carry potentially fatal parasites. In the grocery store check-out line, the cover of Cosmopolitan promises to tell me how to have “Sex For One” and “What Works, What Doesn’t” in removing cellulite. If my radio station is playing Beyoncé and Jay Z’s 2013 song “Drunk in Love,” I’ll hear lyrics that – according to some critics, at least – make light of domestic violence. If I listen to radio news or turn on the evening TV news broadcast, I’ll hear about the latest violence in Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria and other troubled places in the world.

If I log in to Facebook, I can see a friend’s update reporting her doctor’s diagnosis of the cause for her chronic insomnia problem (adrenal fatigue) and another friend’s “shared” pictures offering mental health advice, such as “Stop holding on to what hurts and make room for what feels good.” Other friends offer updates about their children’s health issues, ranging from the minor to the chronic and potentially life-threatening, while yet another, whose husband has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, may have posted a message advocating for more research on improved treatment options.

In short, not only do we live media-saturated lives, but that media saturation exposes us to a steady stream of messages about health. Over the past 40 years, researchers have attempted to determine what impact that river of health messages has on us, both as individuals making health decisions for ourselves and our families, and as communities and societies creating policies and regulations, through our elected and appointed officials, that influence the health opportunities available to us all. This book is intended to review the research on the most important and most thoroughly studied topics related to mass media’s impact on health, to offer some conclusions about what we do and do not know about media effects on health, and to identify key areas for future research.

To establish a context for this discussion, this chapter first examines in more detail recent data on individuals’ interactions with the media environment, focusing primarily on the United States. The next section summarizes the health environment, drawing on multinational studies to show how the health status of U.S. citizens compares to that of individuals in other developed countries throughout the world. The chapter then introduces a matrix for categorizing health impacts of mass media based on whether the health effect is an intended or unintended outcome of the mass media message, whether the effect is positive or negative, and whether it occurs at the level of individual behavior or public health policy (Brown & Walsh-Childers, 1994).

MEDIA CONSUMPTION

Television

Given the enormous growth of Internet use over the past two decades, we might assume that the Web now dominates media consumption. In fact, however, the average consumer still spends more hours watching television content than in any other media activity, with TV accounting for 40 percent of our annual media consumption hours (Short, 2013). From 2008 to 2012, Nielsen figures show a decline of about 15 minutes a day in viewing time for traditional, over-the-air, satellite and cable TV – from 4 hours and 44 minutes in 2008 to 4 hours and 35 minutes in 2012. However, the average individual’s overall weekly time spent with television programming – including viewing television content via DVDs, DVR, video-streaming through the Internet and mobile TV subscriptions – increased from slightly more than 38 hours per week in 2008 to nearly 39 hours in 2012, and is projected to increase to nearly 42 hours per week by 2015; the projected increase is attributed primarily to growth in the use of DVRs, along with mobile and Internet TV (Short, 2013). The most recent Nielsen audience report showed that during the first quarter of 2015, American adults spent about 5.5 hours per day (38.5 hours per week) watching TV content, including traditional “live” TV and time-shifted TV content; adding in use of a DVD or Blu-Ray device would boost the total by ten minutes per day for an overall TV use rate of 39.66 hours per week (The Nielsen Company, 2015b).

The dramatic growth in online TV viewing is a particularly important trend, with 106.2 million Americans reporting in a 2013 Belkin-Harris Interactive poll that they watch TV shows online at least once a month. By 2014, the survey projected that more than 50 percent of Americans would watch TV online (Kleinman, 2013). The growth of online TV viewing helps explain another recent phenomenon, called “cordcutting,” which refers to individuals discontinuing their cable or satellite TV subscriptions. A November 2013 Los Angeles Times article reported that the pay TV industry lost 113,000 subscribers, overall, during the third quarter of 2013, with the largest losses occurring among cable subscribers, some 687,000, during that period (James, 2013). As of early August 2014, nearly half (47%) of American households subscribed to one of the three top video-streaming services – Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime; the percentage of Netflix subscribers who also used a pay TV service had dropped from 88 percent in 2010 to 80 percent in 2014 (Seitz, 2014). During 2014, 8.2 percent of cable TV subscribers reported dropping that service, compared to 6.9 percent who said they had ditched cable TV in 2013. In addition, 45.2 percent of cable subscribers said they had cut back on their cable service, as they spent more time with streaming services (Perez, 2015).

Radio

In 2014, nearly 92 percent of Americans listened to the radio in some format, with radio reaching nearly 90 percent of individuals in every major demographic group; on average, Americans spend about 2.5 hours per day listening to the radio (Nielsen, 2014). The majority of radio listening continues to occur via traditional AM/FM stations, which reached approximately 243 million Americans in 2012 (Short, 2013), but as with online TV viewing, online radio is growing, reaching nearly three-quarters of all Americans in 2015. The number of individual tracks streamed online grew an astonishing 90 percent between the first half of 2014 and the same months of 2015 (The Nielsen Company, 2015a). AM/FM radio is still used more frequently for in-car listening than any other option, followed by CD players, MP3 players, and satellite radio. However, online radio, once used primarily at home or at work, has begun moving into our cars; in 2014, more than one-quarter of mobile phone owners reported listening to online radio in their cars by connecting their phone to the car’s audio system (Edison Research & Triton Digital, 2014). This trend is likely to accelerate as more cars come equipped with wifi hotspot technology, introduced by Audi in 2011; General Motors and Chrysler also now offer built-in wifi (Newcomb, 2014).

Pandora dominates the online radio market, with 31 percent of individuals aged 12 and older reporting that they had used Pandora during the previous month, but iTunes radio, launched in September 2013, had moved into the No. 3 spot, behind Pandora and iHeartRadio, by early 2014. Interestingly, 41 percent of iTunes radio listeners said the platform was increasing their listening time, rather than replacing other online or traditional radio or CD/MP3 listening (Edison Research & Triton Digital, 2014). Across all platforms, country music formats had the greatest share of listeners (14.8 percent of all radio listeners), followed by news/talk stations (11.3%) (Nielsen, 2014).

Music

Music consumption obviously accounts for the vast majority of radio listening, but does radio account for the majority of music consumption? By 2014, the answer was “It depends on the listener.” While adults remain most likely to listen to music on the radio, by 2012, Nielsen research showed that teenagers – who listen to music most often and spend the most time, nearly six hours per week, with music (Nielsen, 2013) – were most likely to cite YouTube as their preferred music-listening venue; 64 percent of teens said they listen to music on YouTube, compared to 56 percent who listen on the radio, 53 percent who use iTunes and 50 percent who listen to CDs (Gross, 2012). That preference for YouTube listening may help explain the recent decline in U.S. album sales, which dropped 15 percent from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014. According to Nielsen’s most recent mid-year SoundScan report, 2014 was only the third year since the studies began in 1991 in which only one album had sold more than a million copies by mid-year; that one album was the soundtrack for the Disney movie Frozen. A 15 percent drop in digital song purchases provided further evidence of the shift toward music streaming and away from music ownership (Stassen, 2014). By 2013, the Recording Industry Association of America reported that more than one-fifth of total music industry revenues were coming from streaming services (Joshua Friedlander, n.d.). Similarly, Nielsen’s comparison of 2012 to 2013 music industry data showed overall music streaming up by 32 percent, while overall music sales were down 6.3 percent (Nielsen, 2013).

Movies

“Seeing a movie” these days is more likely to involve the couch in people’s living rooms than movie theater seats. The number of movie theater tickets sold dropped 11 percent between 2004 and 2013, with a 3 percent drop between 2012 and 2013 (Schwartzel & Fritz, 2014; Motion Picture Association of America, 2013). Sales of movie tickets declined another 6 percent from 2013 to 2014 (Motion Picture Association of America, 2014). Fans who go to the movies once a month or more buy half of all movie tickets; 25- to 39-year-olds are the age group most likely to see movies in the theater more tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 The Media Environment, U.S. Health and the Media-Health Effects Matrix
• Part I. Media Effects on Individuals and Health
• Part II. Media Effects on Health Policy
• Index