Health Framing in TV talk showsCase Study: The Zaraban Program

Health communication plays an important role in informing, encouraging self-care and lifestyle changes to prevent illness and promote health literacy. Health communication is significantly effective in the field of health when used in the appropriate media environment. The media have a serious impact on social reality and play an important and vital role in shaping public opinion through frameworks of discussions. The present paper examines the program of Zaraban - as a dialogic program of the health network index - seeking to answer the question of how health is framed in television programs? In this study, the frameworks are extracted by using quantitative content analysis. The selection of the programs was based on a two-weekly sampling sorted in the first six months of 1397. In this study, the sequence is analysis unit and all the sequences in the selected programs are analyzed. The results show that the Zaraban program has framed health in two forms of treatment and prevention. The treatment framework is considerably more prominent and bolder than the prevention framework. Sub-frame review of the treatment section suggests that general information about the disease is of higher priority than other sub-frameworks. Also, in the prevention context, behavioral recommendations for disease prevention are more important than dietary recommendations, psychological, sports, and tobacco or alcohol recommendations. The findings of the research were discussed and explained with regard to the dimensions and levels of health literacy as well as the media policy of the media.