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

This book examines the relationship between media and medicine. Drawing on insights from anthropology, linguistics, and media studies, it considers 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 of knowledge making and through multiple 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. New to this edition are new case studies, in particular about the COVID-19 pandemic. The first case study looks at pharmaceutical and biotech news, and how journalists portray the flow of information across the boundaries between science and business. The next two case studies examine pandemic news, beginning with the 2009 H1N1 ＂swine flu＂ pandemic and continuing to the COVID-19 pandemic. The final case study examines the treatment of race and racism in health news, looking at the ways it interacts with cultural constructions of health citizenship, and the forces that have produced a shift from deracialization of health news to a much stronger focus on race and racism in contemporary health news.

This book is ideal for undergraduate students and scholars across the social sciences, health sciences, cultural studies, and journalism.

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.