Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life

by Charles L. Briggs, Daniel C. Hallin

Overview

This book examines the relationship between media and medicine, considering the fundamental role of news coverage in constructing wider cultural understandings of health and disease. The authors advance the notion of ‘biomediatization’ and demonstrate how health knowledge is co-produced through connections between dispersed sites and forms of expertise. The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content analysis and ethnographic data on the production and circulation of health news, drawing on work with journalists, clinicians, health officials, medical researchers, marketers, and audiences. The volume provides students and scholars with unique insight into the significance and complexity of what health news does and how it is created.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781317329862
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/20/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	258
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Charles L. Briggs is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His work combines linguistic and medical anthropology with socio-cultural anthropology and folkloristics.

Daniel C. Hallin is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, USA. His work concerns journalism, political communication, and the comparative analysis of media systems.　

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Toward a Framework for Studying Biomediatization

1.  Biocommunicability: Cultural Models of Knowledge about Health
2.  The Daily Work of Biomediatization
3.  What Does This Mean "for the Rest of Us?": Frames, Voices, and the Journalistic Mediation of Health and Medicine

Part II: Biomediatization Up Close: Three Case Studies

4. "You have to hit it hard, hit it early": Biomediatizing the 2009 H1N1 Epidemic
5. Finding the “Buzz,” Patrolling the Boundaries: Reporting Pharma and Biotech
6. "We Have to Put that Four-Letter Word, 'Race,' on the Table": Voicing and Silencing Race and Ethnicity in News Coverage of Health

Editorial Reviews

This fresh, vivid, and surprising book will change how you think about the massive circulation of news about health and disease. Drawing on extensive knowledge and research, Briggs and Hallin show how the tight suturing of biomedicine and the media powerfully affects our culture, our politics, and our identities.”

Steven Epstein, Northwestern University, USA

"This new edition of Making Health Public further confirms its originality and unique contributions. Like the rest of the book, the two new chapters bring up important insights for the study of questions at the intersection of public health, journalism studies, and political communication."

Silvio R. Waisbord, George Washington University, USA

From the Publisher