Causes and Solutions: Mainstream and Black Press Framing of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.

Awareness of policy issues and determinations of their causes affect levels of support for government intervention, and media framing plays an important role, reflecting and shaping public understanding. In the contemporary United States, racial and ethnic health disparities persist, yet knowledge of disparities and support for recent health care policy measures vary significantly by race. This article utilizes a qualitative interpretive approach to examine mainstream and Black presses' framing of causes and solutions to racial and ethnic health disparities. Analysis is conducted on papers in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC between 2009–2011 in the context of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and significant national level actions to address health disparities. The analysis shows that the two genres demonstrate overlapping but distinct patterns, made apparent by attention to features of the framing context. Causal attributions were most often present and systemic in both genres, although mainstream coverage was more likely to convey health disparities' causes as tentative, unfolding, and with less detail. Coverage of solutions varied, with the Affordable Care Act and its likely impact on health disparities given greater attention in African-American newspapers. In some significant respects, then, mainstream and Black press audiences can be said to be receiving rather different senses of health disparities' origins and solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]