Alcohol News Coverage Increasingly Frames Harms Over Health Benefits: Evidence from Two Leading U.S. Newspapers, 2010-2024

OBJECTIVE: News coverage of public health debates matters. This study aimed to explore whether two major newspapers in the U. S. framed alcohol as positive or negative for health from 2010 to 2024, and whether that framing changed over time. METHOD: We examined news stories about alcohol and health that focused on more than a single incident (i.e. non-episodic coverage) in the two largest circulation newspapers in the United States over a 15-year period. Articles were coded as framing alcohol as harmful to health, healthy, or neutral (not taking a position on health, such as stories about alcohol as a business). We calculated annual percent of news articles classified as healthy and harmful to show changes in coverage over time, and assessed these changes for statistical significance. RESULTS: . Coverage in the latter did not change significantly, although it leaned towards alcohol being harmful to health. Coverage in the former, however, shifted from the majority of stories being about alcohol's health benefits, to alcohol being harmful to human health in 2016. This trend was statistically significant ((z=4.06; p<.001). CONCLUSIONS: Coverage of alcohol's role in human health shifted in the largest circulation newspaper in the United States, while coverage in the nation's leading business paper consistently leaned slightly toward the negative. While reported prevalence of alcohol consumption is dropping, the implications of this shifting story for alcohol policies remain to be seen.