Health awareness campaigns are the most overt attempt at making sweeping changes in health through mass media. Such campaigns are generally led by governments or non-profit organizations. "Above the Influence," was one such campaign, where the U.S. government used visual metaphors to suggest that drug use robbed teens of their individuality.
Such campaigns often have different levels of success. For example, AIDS awareness campaigns conducted in the U.S. and the United Kingdom were wildly successful in creating general awareness and anxiety about sexual habit, but demonstrably failed to have a useful impact on the segments of the population most at risk for contacting AIDS, namely young homosexual males and heavy, needle-based drug users. This report comes from 1987 studies by the Department of Health and Social Security in the U.S. and the Welsh Office in the United Kingdom.
Sitcoms, music videos and movies can have a far-reaching, often unintended impact on public health. When characters in a show depict an unhealthy act without repercussions -- such as showing smokers without ever showing someone suffering from emphysema -- members in the audiences may feel more comfortable with engaging in those same unsafe behaviors. One study conducted by researchers Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant in 1982 showed that increased exposure to sexually explicit films led college-aged males to increasingly view the crime of rape in a trivial way.
Sometimes these communications come from entertainment programs portraying a reality wholly different than the one in which the viewer lives. A 1980 survey of television program by researcher Lois Kaufman showed that only 12 percent of television characters had a weight program, in contrast to the 25 percent of Americans had the same problems at the time. Coupled with shows in which characters eat whatever they want and suffer none of these repercussions led researcher Dr. William Dietz to suggest that such disparities were at least partially responsible for causing the sharp increases in adolescents diagnosed with bulimia nervosa (binging on food and subsequently purging) at the time.
News media coverage of health issues serves as a large source of health-related information for Americans, according to a 1990 study by Lawrence Wallack. Unfortunately, not much is known about the particular impacts that health coverage has on the health habits of society. However, many news reports are sparked by innovations, causing many of the messages to frame health issues as something that is best delegated to medical professionals and advanced technologies.
In recent years, mass media has been used to bring important attention to policy and issues that directly affect health. Bryant and co-author Susan Thompson note an example in their book "Fundamentals of Media Affects," in which R.J. Reynolds Nabisco intended on test marketing a new cigarette in a predominantly African American section of Philadelphia. According to Bryant and Thompson, local groups, namely the Coalition Against Uptown Cigarettes, utilized mass media to create awareness of the company's intent. This ultimately forced R.J. Reynolds Nabisco to halt the test marketing.