When Medicine Meets Media: How Health News is Co-produced Between Health and Media Professionals

From the 1980s onwards, the biomedical sector has become intricately interwoven within academic, industrial, state, and media structures. Against a backdrop of biomediatization theory which conceptualizes the production of health news as a multi-sited process of co-production, rather than as a linear translation of biomedical knowledge from the hierarchically superior domain of biomedicine to the media, we provide a holistic interpretive framework for examining the production of health news. By means of in-depth elite interviews (N = 36) with CEOs and communications officers from a variety of health stakeholder organizations that often feature as news sources in health news, as well as with editors of leading media outlets in Belgium, this article finds that the inherent complexity of biomedicine constitutes a delicate context for finding reliable health news sources. Interestingly, and contrary to previous research, our results challenge health journalism's assumed reverence for scientific authority. Second, the fierce struggle for attention in the new hybrid media environment, threatens news organizations' financial viability thus inducing an unanticipated and unwanted difference in quality between free news and news behind a paywall which could further increase existing health inequalities.