Shona Hilton
University of Glasgow, UK
Title: The importance of media in framing public and political debates about NCDs
Biography
Biography: Shona Hilton
Abstract
For the first time in history non-communicable diseases (NCDs) now pose a greater health burden than communicable infectious diseases and the media play a crucial role in framing public and policy debates about the causes of, and solutions to NCDs. While the literature suggests that media debates should be a key concern for those interested in understanding public health policy processes, as yet there has been only limited research in this area. This paper presents the findings from a scoping review, which asked: what are the gaps in current research on media representatives of industries that contribute to NCD risk and how might media representations shape public and political opinion? We searched Web of Science, Medline, Embase, and Google Scholar for three NCD debates, considering how alcohol, processed food and tobacco industries have been represented in the media. Our findings indicate that: (i) limited research that has been undertaken, 61 studies over the last 30 years, mainly dominated by tobacco studies; (ii) comparative research across industries/risk-factors is particularly lacking; and (iii) coverage tends to be dominated by two contrasting frames (market justice and social justice). We conclude that future research is needed that investigates how media debates on NCD risk and policy are related to have a more nuanced understanding of the complex ways in which media representations of unhealthy commodity industries are shaped by, and contribute to shaping, public, corporate and political discourses.