Media and Health

News media are the principal conduit of information about medicine and shape the attitudes of public opinion, physicians, researchers, and policy-makers. However, researchers and policy advocates deem media health with opposing attitudes: they are faulted as courting sensationalism and raising expectations but are also used for promoting behavioral changes from adopting healthier lifestyles to choosing health insurance plans. In fact, different media have different effects in communicating different issues to different audiences. This requires examining production, content, and audience reception of media messages in a common circuit of communication, starting from medical journals and scientists' press releases which are the principal sources of information for journalists writing about medicine. The article describes three broad models of health communication; engages with an internalist and an externalist view of the cozy relations at the interfaces between media and medicine and examines its reception by active audiences.