Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life / Edition 1

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:	9781138999879
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/31/2016
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Charles L. Briggs is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His work combines linguistic and medical anthropology with socio-cultural anthropology and folkloristics. Daniel C. Hallin is Distinguished Professor of Communication, Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. His work concerns journalism, political communication, and the comparative analysis of media systems.

Table of Contents

Introduction, 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, 4. Finding the “buzz,” patrolling the boundaries: Reporting pharma and biotech, 5. “You Have to Hit it Hard, Hit it Early”: Biomediatizing the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, 6. "We're All in this Together"?: Biomediatization of the COVID 19 Pandemic, 7. “We have to put that four-letter word, ‘race,’ on the table”: Voicing and silencing race and ethnicity in news coverage of health, 8. Conclusion

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

“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