Fall 2014
Healthcare in the Headlines: The Affordable Care Act and Making the Most of Media Coverage Barbara Shahinian, Executive Vice President of Content and Creative, Editor-in-chief, Nurse.com
Before it was passed into law in March 2010 — and certainly since then — the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has muscled its way to the top of news headlines. There’s good reason for the attention: not since Medicare became law in 1965 has the healthcare industry seen such sweeping changes. To the news media, the ACA has all the makings of a big, bold story, complete with a complex plot, a mix of characters and heaps of conflict. With its broad political, economic and social consequences, the law is a story with “legs.” We’ll likely be hearing and reading as much about it in a year’s time as we are today. Beneath the twists and turns of the storyline, however, lies a fundamental reason for the telling of this tale. The ACA affects the everyday lives of everyday people like you and me. The law prompts us to make decisions — in our personal lives and sometimes in our jobs. To make the best decisions, we need reliable information from the news. The news media act as the public’s watchdog. They keep an eye on a development like the ACA on our behalf. They bring us facts, inform debates surrounding the law and offer a diverse range of political, economic and social perspectives for our consideration. The media also helps us to understand the issues involved and make the best choices for our families, our communities and ourselves. Business and government rely on the news to make decisions, too; and those decisions impact their employees, partners and constituents — in other words, people like you and me. We invest our trust in the news and view it as an authority, but the media sit on only one side of the information equation. As news consumers, we balance that equation by forming our own opinions on the information presented to us. Credible news organizations follow longstanding principles of journalism and report facts in an objective, fair, accurate and reliable manner. It’s up to us to decide what to do with that information. Sometimes the media do not get the story right. Erroneous or misleading reporting can impact our decisions and have lasting consequences in our personal and professional lives. To get the most of news coverage, particularly in a high-stakes story like the ACA, we can serve as our own watchdogs. The news is a complex industry; and as with any business, it has its own, behind-the-scenes stories. Even so, we can find
ways to ensure the information we seek from the media is the most helpful to us. Here are a few details to consider as you sort out the best news you can use.
Accuracy Alert! Today’s 24/7 news cycle allows information to be distributed quickly — sometimes too quickly. Remember 2013’s up-to-the-second, although inaccurate, reporting on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the ACA? Breaking news can, of course, be vital (in an emergency, for example) but some facts are painstakingly discovered over time. Even when reporters dig deeply into news stories, mistakes happen. Journalists and the organizations for which they work are not perfect, and their errors can range from typographical mistakes to missing the big picture entirely. Research demonstrates that between 40% and 60% of newspaper news stories include some form of error, large or small. In his 2005 study, “Accuracy Matters: A Cross-Market Assessment of Newspaper Error and Credibility,” journalism professor and author Scott R. Maier found that while the public doesn’t expect perfection from news sources, 60% of news readers afford a higher level of credibility to organizations that recognize their mistakes. Yet Maier also found that fewer than 2% of factual errors are corrected by news organizations as a whole. Often those mistakes are repeated by other media and make their way into press releases, research, blogs and other reports on which we rely. The public, however, doesn’t rate well in terms of getting errors corrected, either. According to Maier, only one in 10 sources used in news stories report errors to the media organizations that covered them. Takeaway: Be your own fact checker on issues that are important to you. Compare facts between news reports and seek out an original source, such as a study, if you find a discrepancy. Web searches make this task relatively quick and easy.
Beware of Bias Understanding ways to detect bias in the media can help to ensure your choice of news is fair and dependable. Government, media owners, advertisers and even audience preferences can influence how, why and where news is
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