Formation of Health Media Literacy

In recent years, with the improvement of people's material and cultural living standards, health and longevity have become an important indicator to measure people's happiness, and the public's desire and pursuit for health has also promoted the development of health communication. According to the definition of American scholar Rogers, health communication is an act that transforms medical research results into people's health knowledge, and aims at reducing the incidence and mortality of diseases and effectively improving the quality of life and health of a community or country through changes in attitudes and behaviors. ① In recent ten years, mass health communication in China has become an upsurge, and all kinds of media have seized the health communication market. There are many kinds of health programs broadcast by radio and television stations in various provinces and cities in China, various health books published by many publishing houses, and health periodicals with a circulation of one million. , showing a scene of prosperity. Mass health communication has played a great role in spreading health concepts and health knowledge and providing health services for the masses in China, and has also brought great economic benefits to many mass communication. But it is not difficult to see that in a large number of health information released by various media, it is difficult to distinguish between true and false. Hu _ in the early period, Zhang Wuben _ and Li Yi _ in the recent period, and various sick leave notes. These false health information not only harms consumers' economic interests and health interests, but also affects the harmonious development of our society, leading to the imbalance of people's health communication function. These phenomena not only reflect the lack of social responsibility awareness of some media organizations, but also reflect the serious lack of media literacy of the vast number of health communication audiences who are eager for health information.

The audience's media literacy refers to "the public's ability to choose, understand, question, evaluate, think critically and create and produce media information." . In the process of mass health communication, cultivating and improving the audience's media literacy is the foundation and powerful guarantee to truly realize the mass health communication function.

According to a survey conducted by some researchers, the general tendency of China audience to treat media information is "it seems that all information published in newspapers, radio and television is regarded as authority, and they are not used to making information analysis on its authenticity, objectivity and scientificity, and simply accept it all." . It can be seen that the audience lacks the ability to question and evaluate media information. In order to make the audience have the ability to question and criticize the authenticity of information, we must first let them know the nature and communication process of mass media. Mass communication believes that mass communication is a process in which cultural communication institutions and their professionals spread social information to a large number of different and widely distributed audiences through technical communication media. Economy and so on will affect the gatekeeper of information and decide what kind of information to convey to the audience. (4) Therefore, a healthy mass media audience with media literacy must realize that the information production and dissemination of mass media is not purely objective, and the so-called reality presented to the audience by the media is not the real real world, but the "mimetic environment" created by the media. Media information often contains the personal value orientation of the communicator and does not fully reflect the objective reality. Although China's mass media is state-owned, under the influence of market economy, market standards are becoming more and more important in the information selection of China's mass media. In the past, the audience only saw the publicity and public welfare of the mass media unilaterally (that is, the public services provided by the mass media to meet the social demand for information), believed that the reality of the mass media existed objectively, highly trusted the mass media and the information it disseminated, and ignored the operational nature of the mass media, which might lead to giving up social responsibility in pursuit of ratings and profits. Therefore, the audience blindly believed some health information released by mass media, which appeared.