Abstract
Mass Media and Health examines how mass media affect the health beliefs and behaviors of individuals as well as public health policies in the United States. This analysis is conducted through a review of about a century of research on mass media effects on health. The author is a professor at the Department of Journalism of the University of Florida and a former newspaper health reporter. Since 1990, she has taught graduate students on the subjects of “mass media ethics” and “mass media and health.” For about 25 years, she has collected more and more material with the aim of providing students and scholars with an overview on mass media and health topics.
The book starts with an introduction to contemporary mass media consumption in the United States and on health conditions of the country and provides a theoretical approach through the media health effects matrix elaborated by Jane Brown and Walsh-Childers in their earlier text, Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. The first part of the book then focuses on media effects on individuals. It introduces the individualistic essence of U.S. society that affects how individuals consider their responsibility for their actions. It reviews research studies on the effects of media health content on individual health behaviors. This part is larger because an important amount of research has focused on this topic. The second part of the book examines media effects on public policy relevant to health, and is less extensive due to a smaller amount of the research on this topic. The concluding chapter furnishes an overview of what is not yet known about the mass media effects on health, and outlines possible paths for future research.
The book presents an excellent quality of writing: It is accurate, very well organized, and the argumentative structure is well explained. The language is plain and intelligible. Chapters offer many examples from everyday life, linking them to theoretical concepts and research studies in a clear and explicit manner. Social mechanisms and media processes are made interesting to professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars from different disciplines. The literature review is detailed and comprehensive, and these elements make this book fairly unique in its genre.
As examples of the text’s clarity and readability, the following features must be mentioned. Chapters or sections often begin by proposing a question to answer with the chapter contents. This is a useful strategy, which helps students to focus on the key issue to study and on the social implications of specific phenomena. For instance, Chapter 2 on health information online proposes the question “how much health information is available online?” Also the focus of the book is made explicit through a question: “how are high media use and poorer health related to each other?” Furthermore, chapters usually start with or report an emblematic anecdote of the specific topic deepened by the subsequent contents of the chapter. Where possible, these anecdotes are visually reinforced by means of a picture (e.g., a photogram from a movie or from an advertisement). For instance, Chapter 3 on tobacco advertising starts with a detailed description and explanation of the “Be Marlboro” advertising campaign, based on a Stanford University research study, and it is enriched with a photo and a headline of one of the Marlboro’s campaigns.
The contribution to the field is undeniable. In effect, the book cannot be considered merely a literature review, but a research study that is conducted wisely through several hundreds of references collected over many years. Each chapter, at the end, offers suggestions about paths for future research. For instance, Chapter 2 on health information online suggests the importance of a key research area for the future: how to promote consumers’ acquisition of e-health skills. Chapter 7 on media and nutrition highlights the need to explore whether online and mobile applications can produce positive effects and balance the negative effects of media on people’s nutrition and physical activity. Despite scant literature on the matter, the complex topic of media effects on health policy discussed in the second part of the book is explained in a passionate way with many effective examples.
A weakness of the book resides in the fact that the literature reviewed does not go beyond the years 2014 to 2015. However, it covers a wide time span, specific for the different topics of each chapter. Another, less important weakness concerns the pictures used in the book: They are in black and white, and sometimes are not material collected by a specific research study (e.g., the ad of the Marlboro campaign), but merely refer to or reinforce a concept or theme discussed in a chapter. Furthermore, in general, there are no connections with research outside the U.S. context. Intentionally, the book does not cover traditional mass media health communication campaigns, a topic already well examined by other texts.
Overall, the book cleverly encourages readers to focus on new scenarios for future research in the United States on the topic of media effects on health and health policy. As the author suggests, the aim of the book is not to see only individual trees in the media/health forest, but to survey and offer a perspective on the forest as a whole. Although not having this specific aim, this book stimulates similar analyses that are lacking in countries different from the United States.
