Health news reporting: A conceptual framework of journalistic cultural competence.

This article focuses on developing a conceptual framework for journalistic cultural competence in health news reporting, emphasizing its importance for accurately covering Indigenous and non-western health beliefs and practices within multicultural contexts. Drawing on Campinha-Bacote’s model of cultural competence—which includes cultural desire, awareness, knowledge, encounters, and skills—the framework integrates these components with established dimensions of journalistic competence such as values, self-reflection, knowledge, and skills. The authors argue that cultural competence is an ongoing, dynamic process essential to all stages of health journalism, enabling reporters to better engage diverse cultural communities and produce more inclusive, culturally sensitive health news. The framework aims to guide education and training for health journalists, particularly in contexts like Australia where non-western medical traditions such as traditional Chinese medicine are prevalent, and calls for further empirical validation and adaptation across different media systems.