Main description:

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.

Contents:

Preface

Chapter 1: The media environment, U.S. health and the media-health effects matrix

Section 1 Introduction

Chapter 2: Health information online - Building a web to improve health behavior

Chapter 3: Tobacco advertising - The paradox of marketing to shorten customers' lives

Chapter 4: Predictable negative effects - Marketing alcohol misuse and abuse

Chapter 5: Take a pill for "better health" - Direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising

Chapter 6: Fun and glamour through smoking, drinking and drugs - Entertainment media portrayals of substance use

Chapter 7: Do the media make us fat? Advertising and entertainment portrayals of food, nutrition and exercise

Chapter 8: Showing us what we should (and cannot) be - The mass media mirror and body image

Chapter 9: Lust, love and romance with few consequences - Media portrayals of sex

Chapter 10: The mean and scary media world - The impact of media violence

Chapter 11: Reporting on health for better or worse - News media effects on knowledge, beliefs and behaviors

Chapter 12: Peer-to-peer health - The good and bad news about Facebook, Instagram, blogs and other social media

Section 2: Policy-level effects introduction

Chapter 13: How health news can affect non-news consumers - News media and health policy

Chapter 14: Focusing the spotlight on problems upstream - Media advocacy to influence policy

Chapter 15: Big spenders in the marketplace of ideas - Political issue advertising effects on health policy

Chapter 16: Media effects on health - What we still need to know