Will Global Health Be a Casualty of Mainstream Media's Decline?

by Mara Gordon · 2009-08-25 10:45:00 UTC
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(photo credit: eclaire)

Where do you get your global health news?

Trick question. You already read this blog, which if I do say so myself, does a pretty good job keeping you in the know about both important global health policy updates and new science.

OK, OK, but beyond Alanna's fabulous blogging - how do you stay up to date? Like you probably do, I read quite a smorgasbord of health news offerings, ranging from the Washington Post to niche blogs written by people working on the front lines around the globe.

And increasingly, I rely on non-profit news sources. Unlike traditional newspapers, they take many forms: organizations funded by wealthy philanthropists, fellowships for journalists to write about neglected diseases, websites of organizations and academics whose global health research I respect. These sources give me perspectives I'd never get from simply following the mainstream media, but do they give me rigorous, fact-checked, accurate perspectives, too?

To get some answers, I turned to Maralee Schwartz, a former Washington Post editor and fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. I got in touch with Schwartz because she recently published a report on non-profit foundations that provide health news (most notably, the Kaiser Family Foundation, which produces an excellent daily aggregation of global health headlines). Her report focuses on U.S. health news, but it asks all the right questions.

Schwartz professed that she isn't an expert on global health news, but she is quite well-informed about an issue that I think will be increasingly relevant to all of us who work in and care about international health. If the information is free, can we really trust it?

"If journalistic standards are applied to the material, I don't have a problem," she wrote in an e-mail interview. "Information comes from lots of different sources -- the key is that the consumer of the information is clear about the source, and trusts the source."

So will global health activists of the 21st century be getting their news from do-gooder sources, not publications looking for a profit?

"During the course of my interviews, Harvard Professor Robert Blendon mentioned that he could see a time when, say, the Gates Foundation might become interested in funding global health news or news on global education issues," Schwartz wrote. "I think if these various nonprofit models on health care are viewed as successful, expanding the coverage to global issues is certainly a possibility."

Check out Schwartz's report on foundation-funded health news here.

Mara Gordon has worked in public health in Tanzania and in Botswana. She originally hails from Washington, D.C.
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