Historically, there has been limited evidence about how the news media cover the various components of the social safety net. Our research is filling these gaps. For example, there has been abundant TV news attention to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) generally, although attention to Medicaid in particular has been very limited. Coverage of health insurance, in both 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, has tended to report on political fights and often features politicians identified with their partisanship. Such coverage patterns can contribute to polarized responses among the public. In contrast, there has been far less TV news coverage about paid leave and ECE. Coverage of ECE in 2018-2019 tended to be sensationalized, focusing on adverse events and very rarely on policy. News coverage of paid leave, however, focused much more often on policy solutions and, in contrast with health insurance policy, presented bipartisan support. Across all of the areas, TV news coverage rarely, if ever, described the relationship between safety net investments and advancing health equity (nor do politicians in their campaign ads).

With all of these policy issues, it is important to recognize that communication is rarely one-sided or static. Advocates and policymakers on all sides of the issues – along with industry representatives, such as health insurers – compete in the information environment. Our research has found, for instance, that insurance ads shape the public’s health insurance-seeking behaviors and public opinion—but so, too, do political ads in opposition to the ACA, with higher volumes of the latter related to lower enrollment. Members of the public encounter messaging about these topics from a variety of sources that include both news and ads and often convey very different messages about the social safety net.

Our research also contributes evidence about how to communicate effectively in the face of counter-messaging. For example, we have examined the ways that stories about people and their communities can shift public opinion toward support of greater investments in the social safety net (though stories must be carefully constructed to achieve these goals; see here). We have also tested the conditions under which strategic messages can “inoculate” audiences against messaging that opposes evidence-based policies that advance population health (see here and here), finding that these strategies can be effective (though they may have limited impact on issues that have been politicized and partisan). We have further explored how messages framed to align with moral and/or partisan values can enhance the likelihood of generating support among audiences from diverse political ideologies (see here and here). Finally, we have described the effects of how various portrayals of social safety net policies shape perceptions of who benefits from the policy and could invite biased and racist views about who is  “deserving” of such support.