ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that health should be located within a post-racial social world, triggering frames are often necessary to authorize explicit racial referents. While most health news projects the notion that race is largely irrelevant where health is concerned, periodically a story does bring race into the picture, explicitly or implicitly. Health and medicine are generally projected as fields where race is essentially irrelevant, eclipsed by the universalism of biomedical science and technology or by the individualism of the active patient-consumer. Stories that foreground race and ethnicity often have their origin in research studies highlighting racial and ethnic differences. News stories that focus on race and ethnicity do not simply re-present biomedical research but form crucial dimensions of biomediatization processes that co-produce research, clinical trials, tests, drugs, and so forth. On television, unlike newspapers, the audience can make identifications of race and/or ethnicity.
