News Coverage of Health in the United States

Race and Health

The component of the project that focuses on race and health begins from previous research on news coverage of health issues that has suggested that such factors as:

• language,
• access to particular news media,
• the circulation of stigmatizing images, and
• the portrayal of racialized subjects as ignorant or uncooperative
• contribute to communicative health inequities associated with race. 

Our project explores how processes of producing, circulating, and receiving health coverage structures communicative health inequalities.  We do so by looking at the ideologies and practices on which they rely.  We have found that the way that communicative processes are characterized in news coverage of health issues generally depicts African-Americans and Latino/s as simply being out of the loop. People of color generally appear in the "doctor's orders" model, where they are seen as being unable or unwilling to obtain biomedical information, incapable of understanding it, or actively resisted it. People of color are seldom place in the role of the neoliberal patient-consumer, the current model of rationality and responsibility in constructions of biomedical citizenship.

 

May 5, 2002, /San Diego Union-Tribune/, by JimGogek

/San Diego Union-Tribune/, by Leslie Wolf Brancomb