By MARTY LEVINE
“For better or worse, media is such a large part of our lives,” notes Beth Hoffman, a School of Public Health faculty member who started a new class this spring, “Entertainment Media and Health.” The challenge is to harness it for good, she says.
“We see a lot about the harmful effects of media. But if 10 million people a week are watching a TV show, how can we as public health educators leverage that” for positive effects — in this time when science communication is a challenge?
The class reflects Hoffman’s primary area of research within the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences. “The way entertainment media influences viewers’ perceptions of certain health topics” as well as their “public health behavior,” such as how they perceive and act on TV portrayals of such issues as vaping or the COVID-19 vaccination. “This Is Us,” for instance, encouraged viewers to talk to family members about advanced care planning.
Her undergraduates in the new class are digital natives. “They grew up with TVs in their pockets, so it felt really important for them to have a class where they are thinking about how media influences them.”
“ER” and “Chicago Hope” ushered in an era of realism and accuracy in depictions of medical issues decades ago, Hoffman says, and the greater variety of streaming TV today only forces shows to be more accurate, she believes: “Now that there is so much content, it is getting better. If it doesn’t resonate with people, people don’t watch it. Shows are having to compete for viewers.”
The students in “Entertainment Media and Health” watch and dissect television shows to see how they treat public health topics — what is accurate and what is not, what might push viewers to consider and act on certain health-related issues and what could have the opposite effect.
Guest lecturers have added their perspective from the academic and entertainment worlds, including Kate Burton, who played the first TV character with Alzheimer’s on “Grey’s Anatomy,” joining the class via Zoom, as did a physician who regularly lends his expertise to different medical shows.
Hoffman credits her late sister for inspiring the class as well, since her sister introduced her to “ER” years ago. The show had them talking positively about the idea of becoming organ donors, for instance. “It was just very meaningful to teach this course,” Hoffman says.
The class has been encouraging, she adds, since her students in that first semester turned out to be skilled communicators when tackling their final projects: Creating tip sheets on specific public health topics for use in TV shows and other media.
“I wanted the final project to be something tangible and that could be useful beyond the classroom. I was really blown away... with how they worked with examples from current media and examples from the scientific literature.” And she is pleased to note that a local emergency medicine physician shared a tip sheet on CPR, which she had earlier created, with the producers of an upcoming medical show to be set in town, “The Pitt.”
Communicating a message through storytelling, and not the mere recitation of facts, is key to public health communication, and Hoffman collaborates often with the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, whose “Hollywood, Health and Society” project has conducted research on everything from “Increases in calls to the CDC National STD and AIDS hotline following AIDS-related episodes in a soap opera” to “The Impact of Food and Nutrition Messages on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” It also provides consultants to shows from “Breaking Bad” to “Black-ish,” and a Lear Center rep spoke in Hoffman’s class.
Hoffman was recently lead author on a published overview of current research evidence on the media and health, which found that “health storylines on fictional television influence viewers.” It cited Lear Center studies that more than half the episodes of non-medical programs include “patient-healthcare provider interaction,” which is influential as well.
“When viewers observe a character on television with whom they identify engaging in certain behaviors, they may be prompted to change their own behavior,” Hoffman’s research team said, citing theories that “identification (or character involvement) is associated with an increase in knowledge gained and behavioral intent” and “when viewers are engaged in a storyline, they are less likely to counterargue against the depicted messages, eventually leading to persuasion in line with the messages in the entertainment program.”
While there are extreme examples of such effects — one woman diagnosed her own rare disease from its TV depiction and then opened a clinic for fellow sufferers — it also notes that researchers still need to systematically examine the issue more fully, doing further research on “a broader array of television programming with adolescent participants … and examining the influence of health storylines about chronic disease or substance use.”
Another study she led, of people tweeting reactions to a newer medical show, “Code Black,” while it aired, concluded that the show prompted “real-life motivation to pursue health sciences careers based on the program, engagement regarding medical accuracy and respect for the nursing profession.”
“Unfortunately, scientists and public health professionals haven’t been trained in storytelling,” Hoffman says, whereas the COVID-19 pandemic showed that “being able to communicate the science” is crucial to moving the public to take helpful actions.
Harvard now offers a graduate-level online certificate, “Media and Medicine: How to Tell Stories That Make a Difference,” for medical professionals as well as journalists, bioethicists and others. But Hoffman does not know of another undergraduate level class such as hers. She says it complements another Pitt Public Health class on the impact of social media on health perceptions and outcomes, taught by faculty Jaime Sidani and Kar-Hai Chu. “It also fits very well with our relatively new bachelor’s in public health” degree program, she points out.
On television, “even if a story isn’t a hundred-percent accurate, it can be a springboard” for people to look into the issues, Hoffman says. Often, TV’s medical dramas will be accurate but, understandably, condensed from 48 hours to 40 minutes, since “nobody wants to watch somebody filling out paperwork,” Hoffman jokes. But these shows can still make people want to follow public health and medical careers, as was her own experience.
“I just hope, in general, the class has sparked some critical thinking and media literacy” among the students, she says. After watching the portrayal of HIV on “ER” from the 1990s — the fear and the stigma — her students were asked to imagine how COVID portrayals in recent shows will be judged 30 years from now.
Pitt Public Health was the leader in developing the Salk vaccine for polio, she points out. Public health education and media literacy can be a sort of vaccination against misinformation, she says: “We often talk about it as inoculation. Misinformation is not going away. How can we make people less susceptible to it?”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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