Berkeley Media Studies Group (BMSG) is honored to be a grantee of The Kresge Foundation’s Advancing Health Equity Through Housing Initiative. This initiative seeks to identify community-driven practices that connect the housing and health sectors and recognize multisector partnerships that preserve and increase the supply of stable housing to improve the health and well-being of families and communities in cities around the country.
Domestic violence and homelessness are deeply connected, but current news narratives and framing often portray these issues as separate, leading policymakers and the public to ignore this important link. In collaboration with Blue Shield of California Foundation, BMSG is working to support sustained narrative change around these issues.
The pandemic forced lawmakers to expand food assistance programs amid rising food insecurity. But are views on hunger shifting back to pre-pandemic times? Researchers from BMSG and the Collaborative on Media and Messaging for Health and Social Policy Team looked at news coverage to find out.
We’re creating and compiling resources to help public health advocates, staff in local health departments, and others communicate more effectively about COVID-19 and how it intersects with other important public health issues.
Research has found that most U.S. residents do not recognize the contributions that Latinos, the nation’s largest ethnic minority, make to society or understand the barriers they face. Making people more aware of these realities can encourage more U.S. policymakers, leaders, and the public to support expanded access to opportunities for everyone — including Latino communities. One way to increase awareness and spur action is to elevate coverage of Latinos in the news media.
Firearms are the leading cause of death for young people across the United States. Additionally, most firearm deaths are from suicide yet do not receive the same level of media attention as homicides. Through this project, BMSG is working with grantees of the Missouri Foundation for health to help them develop and deliver strategic messages about firearm violence and suicide prevention, using framing that centers health equity.
In collaboration with the Hope and Heal Fund, BMSG is working to better understand the narrative on gun violence in California and consider how we can widen the frame to include more than mass shootings.
As a growing number of city governments declare racism a public health issue, BMSG is partnering with the Praxis Project to evaluate such declarations by assessing how they were received by local stakeholders, how they were covered by the media, and whether they resulted in government action to dismantle inequities.
With colleagues from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and UCSF’s School of Medicine, we conducted a news analysis, comparing how supporters and opponents framed their messages in four successful California-based SSB tax campaigns.
Tractor rollovers are the leading cause of death on farms. Widespread adoption of a rebate program to help farmers purchase and install rollover protective structures would prevent injuries and deaths and save taxpayers millions of dollars. BMSG is working with New York Center for Agricultural Medicine and Health to help teams in states with high tractor rollover fatalities make the case for rebate programs.
