Politics in Nursing and Health Care

According to a survey conducted a week after the video’s release, the way people learned about this story varied strikingly by age cohort. Around half of young adults (aged 18 to 29) who had heard about the video first did so through social media, compared with an even mix of social and traditional news sources for those aged 30 to 49. Traditional media, especially television, informed most adults aged 50 and over (Rainie et al., 2012b).

The ownership of the Internet (e.g., online infrastructures, operating systems, and search engines) is following consolidation patterns similar to traditional media, with a few large companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft dominating the field (Freepress.net, 2014). Nonetheless, the more decentralized structure of the Web may better enable citizens to not only break news, but shape it. This bodes well for nurses who have not always been able to garner media attention for their issues. A study commissioned by Sigma Theta Tau and published in 1998 documented nursing’s invisibility in the media. The Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media found that nurses were included in health stories in major print media (newspapers and news magazines published in September 1997) less than 4% of the time, even when they would have been germane to the story. And even more disturbing, nurses were represented in health care industry publications (such as Modern Healthcare) less than 1% of the time.

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These findings may indicate a systematic journalistic bias against nursing. They also arise because nurses have not been proactive in accessing traditional media. Social media provides an opportunity for nurses to not wait for traditional media to value their perspectives. Nurses can use social media to create and distribute messages, to engage others to care about an issue, and to discuss issues from various vantage points. Given that the annual Gallup Poll continues to find that Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of nurses higher than any other profession (e.g., in 2013, 82% for nurses, 69% for physicians, 21% for newspaper reporters, 8% for members of Congress), nurses have a unique opportunity to send persuasive messages (Gallup, 2014).