When the negative politics of Stormont contaminate the positive framing of news about organ donation

Recent coverage of organ donation in Northern Ireland has been merging during several weeks with the political paralysis of the country's assembly that started in May last year.

In a nutshell, Northern Ireland Assembly's has not convened to agree the final steps needed to implement the opt-out law for organ donation from spring 2023.

While the UK Parliament is now going to make an exceptional intervention so the law can be enacted, the entanglement with a fully unrelated conflict that stems from Brexit holds in my view valuable lessons to reflect on how organ donation is discussed in today's media landscape.

As suggested in a previous post, mainstream news about organ donation have increasingly involved families making some form of political pressure (or activism?) so opt-out frameworks for organ donation are implemented. The coverage had provided welcome photo opportunities for politicians. 

Organ donation moves into the dark of the news spectrum

Early in January, however, NI politics moved to the negative spectrum of the news coverage when the prospect that frictions in Stormont might delay final implementation of the opt-out law were to account for the possible loss of little children on the organ waiting list.

Thus, little Dáithí MacGabhann (one of the main faces in the campaign for the opt-out system) became a boy 'at the centre of Northern Ireland politics' and his family 'Frustrated that there is still no clear path or agreement between the politicians', even though the UK government had pledged to explore possible avenues. 

Opt-out law campaigners are now framed as political protagonists
in the latest news cycle about organ donation in Northern Ireland

Other negative coverage announced the law was unlikely to succeed, holding the main unionist party accountable for not dropping the block and facing mounting calls that involved Sinn Fein inviting the MacGabhann family to plead their case in a recalled assembly session.

From positive to negative sentiments

The news cycle has now moved on, but it remains in a frame where intervention of the UK government has been necessary. 

In a way, this frame signals contamination of a coverage that had in recent years moved decisively to reflect on organ donation on the basis of positive sentiments.

While preferable, positive "emotionalization" is not an ideal narrative for public health communication in the news media. One reason for this is that journalists easily give in to new angles as soon as the twists and turns of life in society open up to alternative scripts for storytelling.

As demonstrated by Briggs, the interests of health communicators and the news media don't always align. Positive emotionalization works when there are human faces at the centre of a news report (2011: 222). 

When it comes to organ donation, organ shortages mean the queue of patients waiting for a suitable organ (either from a posthumous or living donor) to become available is always long. 

The availability of people prepared to speak to the press about their life-or-death prospects may explain the tendency of positive coverage of organ donation in the news media in different parts of the world.

The logic of consumer journalism in a digital landscape

The proliferation of digital content has arguably brought about significant changes first found in news media's embrace of a "commercial media logic" and then in political communication's adoption of "network media logic". 

Consumer journalism is far from a new development, but as news organisations struggle to remain relevant as sources of information and businesses, approaches to the communication of organ donation remain open to disruption. 

Health institutions and officers have of course known this for years. which is why they've been involved in promoting organ donation by investing a great deal of resources cultivating relationships with journalists.

As documented by Moya Valero's systematic study of Spain's National Organization for Transplants (or ONT), the institution has carefully adapted the news media's logic of content production to its public communication strategies.

ONT's architect, Rafael Matesanz, had suggested as much in an article for the Transplantation Proceedings journal when he wrote that 'the best way of influencing public opinion is the media' (2002: 988).

Screenshot of The Irish News 10 February story online

Matesanz argued then that public misconceptions and negative publicity are to be tackled 'with adequate and systematic spread... of the positive and life-enhancing aspects of organ donation and transplantation'.  

It is reasonable to assume that similar efforts have been the norm in other countries, which might speak to Feeley and Vincent III's findings that a significant majority of newspapers articles in the US covered organ donation in a positive light.

That Feeley, O'Mally and Covert later on found a tendency of newspapers to sensationalise negative events in organ donation only emphasises the continued efforts that health communicators need to make to, as put by Matesanz, 'managing adverse publicity' (ibid.). 

There is therefore a case to be made that adverse publicity is happening when emotionalization of organ donation becomes entangled with the bad politics of our time.