ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |20 pages

Introduction

part 1|84 pages

Toward a framework for studying biomediatization

chapter 1|29 pages

Biocommunicability

Cultural models of knowledge about health 1

chapter 2|26 pages

The Daily Work of Biomediatization

chapter 3|28 pages

What Does this Mean “for the rest of us?”

Frames, voices, and the journalistic mediation of health and medicine

part 2|112 pages

Biomediatization up close: three case studies

chapter 4|33 pages

“You Have to Hit it Hard, Hit it Early”

Biomediatizing the 2009 H1N1 epidemic

chapter 5|26 pages

Finding the “buzz,” patrolling the boundaries

Reporting pharma and biotech

chapter 6|39 pages

“We have to put that four-letter word, ‘race,' on the table”

Voicing and silencing race and ethnicity in news coverage of health

chapter 7|13 pages

Conclusion