Narratives in Health Policy: A Comparative Analysis of Public and Professional Media

This paper compares the narratives of health policy reforms within the public arena (mass media) and the subsystem arena (professional press) during the government period from December 2021 to February 2025 in Germany. The research focuses on three key topics which are cannabis legalization, hospital reform and Health Kiosks (Gesundheitskiosk). We aim to analyze how the narratives of these issues differ between public media, represented by the Tagesschau (largest public television and internet news media) and professional media which is represented by the German Medical Journal (Deutsches Ärzteblatt). Our hypothesis is grounded in the Narrative Policy Framework, which posits that narratives are used strategically to influence decisions. We argue that the narrative across the media types vary substantially in terms of characters and causal mechanisms. We conduct a comparative content analysis to explore the research question and how this divergence may affect the policy making process. This paper contributes to the Narrative Policy Framework by showing how policy narratives are strategically constructed and vary across public subsystem arenas.