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Multicenter Study
. 2016 Jan 13;6(1):e008837.
doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2015-008837.

Newspaper coverage of maternal health in Bangladesh, Rwanda and South Africa: a quantitative and qualitative content analysis

Frey Gugsa  1 , Ellora Karmarkar  2 , Andrew Cheyne  3 , Gavin Yamey  4
Affiliations
Multicenter Study

Newspaper coverage of maternal health in Bangladesh, Rwanda and South Africa: a quantitative and qualitative content analysis

Frey Gugsa et al. BMJ Open. .

Abstract

Objective: To examine newspaper coverage of maternal health in three countries that have made varying progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG 5): Bangladesh (on track), Rwanda (making progress, but not on track) and South Africa (no progress).

Design: We analysed each country's leading national English-language newspaper: Bangladesh's The Daily Star, Rwanda's The New Times/The Sunday Times, and South Africa's Sunday Times/The Times. We quantified the number of maternal health articles published from 1 January 2008 to 31 March 2013. We conducted a content analysis of subset of 190 articles published from 1 October 2010 to 31 March 2013.

Results: Bangladesh's The Daily Star published 579 articles related to maternal health from 1 January 2008 to 31 March 2013, compared to 342 in Rwanda's The New Times/The Sunday Times and 253 in South Africa's Sunday Times/The Times over the same time period. The Daily Star had the highest proportion of stories advocating for or raising awareness of maternal health. Most maternal health articles in The Daily Star (83%) and The New Times/The Sunday Times (69%) used a 'human-rights' or 'policy-based' frame compared to 41% of articles from Sunday Times/The Times.

Conclusions: In the three countries included in this study, which are on different trajectories towards MDG 5, there were differences in the frequency, tone and content of their newspaper coverage of maternal health. However, no causal conclusions can be drawn about this association between progress on MDG 5 and the amount and type of media coverage of maternal health.

Keywords: Bangladesh; Millennium Development Goal 5; Newspaper; Pregnancy and childbirth; Rwanda; South Africa.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Development Assistance for Health (DAH) for Bangladesh, Rwanda, and South Africa between 2007 and 2012.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Number of articles related to MDG 5 (maternal health) published between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2012 in The Daily Star (Bangladesh), The New Times/The Sunday Times (Rwanda) and Sunday Times/The Times (South Africa). From 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2010, Bangladesh's The Daily Star showed the highest rate of increase in the annual number of articles published related to maternal health. From 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2012, Rwanda's The New Times/The Sunday Times showed the highest rate of increase. South Africa's Sunday Times/The Times had the slowest rate of increase from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2012. MDG 5, Millennium Development Goal 5.
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