Twenty years after the initial Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media, a reexamination of how nurses are portrayed in the news media is released

Out of George Washington School of Nursing, nurse researchers, Diana Mason, Barbara Glickstein, Kristi Westphaln, and Laura Nixon release their study. Quoting their release:

The Woodhull Study Revisited

Diversity is key to good journalism in a pluralistic society — whether diversity of topics, journalists or sources. Women continue to be underrepresented in newsrooms (24 percent) and as expert sources in news stories (36 percent). Although women are included as sources in 48 percent of health news stories, the Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media: Health Care’s Invisible Partner, published in 1998, found that nurses were identified as sources in only 4 percent of quotes or other sourcing in health news stories in leading print national and regional newspapers and 1 percent in weeklies and industry publications such as Modern Healthcare in September of 1997. Nurses were never cited in health news stories on policy and were rarely identified in photos accompanying the articles. Named after Nancy Woodhull, a founding editor of USA Today, the study raised awareness that the voices and perspectives of the nation’s largest group of health professionals — now 3.5 million, almost 90 percent of whom are women — were largely invisible even when they would have been germane to the story. 

Click here to see the entire press release.

Click here to see the Woodhull Study Revisited.

We also have an archived copy here.