News Coverage of Health in the United States

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• Why is news coverage, both print and television, overflowing with health reporting these days?
  
• What relationship does that bear to direct-to-consumer advertising by big pharma, particularly on television?
  
• Why is there so much bad and contradictory news about health these days?
  
• Why is news coverage, both print and television, overflowing with health reporting these days?
• What relationship does that bear to direct-to-consumer advertising by big pharma, particularly on television?
• Why is there so much bad and contradictory news about health these days?

Beginning in 2003, Professors Charles L. Briggs (UC Berkeley) and Daniel C. Hallin (UC San Diego) collaborated with students and Dr. Clara Mantini-Briggs in constructing a large corpus of news coverage of health issues, analyzing it quantitative and qualitatively, interviewing reporters, editors, producers, health officials, researchers, hospital administrators, clinicians, and leaders of social movement organizations, and conducting focus groups to explore how this material is received. Initially focusing on the San Diego Union-Tribune, we have now compiled materials from the New York Times, Spanish and English television news, and coverage of specific health crises.

In addition to studying the content of health news coverage, we have gone further to see how it ideologically constructs:

• what constitutes knowledge about the body, health, disease, and health care
  
• who makes this knowledge
  
• how this knowledge should circulate
  
• who should receive this information and how
  
• how different people are located in the entailed subject-positions

We trace the shift from a concept of knowledge production in health between two dominant models. The first involves a unilinear transmission from biomedical specialists to passive patients, which we call the biomedical authority or doctor's orders model, ; this understanding of health communication predominated from the 1960s to the 1980s. Click here for an example. This model has recently been partially displace by, partially complemented by one that centers on the neoliberal patient consumer, who has a governmental obligation to amass information on health that relates to their own "risks" and desires, sort through it rationally, and then make sound judgments from among the rich range of options for prevention and treatment that are supposedly available to all health consumers in the United States. Click here for an example. Rather than a simple story of the triumph of neoliberalism, however, health news coverage presents itself today as a complex mélange of contradictory logics that provide basic understandings of what it means to be a health professional, a patient, a citizen, and a person who just doesn’t seem to get the message.

The project also explores new theoretical intersections between media theory, linguistic anthropology, critical medical anthropology, and Latin American Social Medicine.