Spreading the News: Social Determinants of Health Reportage in Canadian Daily Newspapers

As part of a research program called CHAMP (Canadian Health and Media Project) devoted to examining health literacy in Canadian daily newspapers, and operating from a theoretical framework that posits journalism as a practice of representation, this article is based on a series of formal interviews with English-language and French-language health reporters. The interviews sought answers to three central questions about health reportage: how do journalists demarcate such a vast topic as health? where do they find their stories? and to what extent are they familiar with research into the social determinants of health? It concludes that in spite of their dependence upon published scholarly research as a source of news stories, Canadian health reporters overemphasize the roles of the health care system and personal health habits in the production of Canadians’ health, and they underemphasize the role of social determinants.