Biomedicalization and Media in Comparative Perspective: Audiences, Frames, and Actors in Norwegian, Spanish, U.K. and U.S. Health News

Abstract

This study examines health news in Norwegian, Spanish, British, and U.S. newspapers. It seeks to fill a gap in journalism studies in the examination of health news as a genre, particularly in a comparative context, and with a focus on broader social and political roles and meanings of health news, rather than effects on individual behavior. It is rooted in literatures that seek to understand health journalism in sociological terms, considering the role of health journalism in relation to institutional relationships between biomedicine, the market, and the state. It departs, in particular, from the theory of biomedicalization, which holds that the field of biomedicine, increasingly transformed into a complex, commercialized “techno-service complex,” has deep cultural impact, including the spreading of a conception of an individualized patient-consumer who will actively seek information to control risk and pursue wellness. In this article, we ask whether research on health news centered around this model, mostly carried out in the United States, is generalizable to European countries where the health system is organized primarily according to a public service model. The study considers three aspects of health news content: the implied audience of news stories, distinguishing in particular between those that address readers as patient-consumers and those that address them as citizens; the distinction among biomedical, lifestyle, and social frames for understanding health issues; and the range of actors reflected in health news as sources and as story originators.

Sourcing Pandemic News: A Cross-National Computational Analysis of Mainstream Media Coverage of COVID-19 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

“…Health sourcing has been analyzed from the perspective of credibility, expertise, and trustworthiness in that sources must show competence, report accurate information, and make valid assertions (McCroskey and Young 1981;Metzger and Flanagin 2015). Health communication and journalism research has shown that there is a tendency among journalists to perceive scientists and biomedical researchers as authoritative experts and neutral sources, and to seek "white coats" to give credibility to the news (Forsyth et al 2012;Hinnant, Len-R ıos, and Oh 2012;Len-R ıos et al 2009, p. 318;Hallin, Figenschou, and Thorbjørnsrud 2021).…”

“…The literature tends to show that overall, medical professionals and health specialists, academics, and government authorities and politicians continue to be the most important voices in news coverage by traditional media (Atkin et al 2008;De Dobbelaer et al 2018;Oh, Kwon, and Raghav Rao 2010;Stroobant, De Dobbelaer, and Raeymaeckers 2018;Wu 2006;Hallin, Brandt, andBriggs 2013 Hallin, Figenschou, andThorbjørnsrud 2021). Some studies have found that the presence of citizens as sources in health news is comparatively low (Rowe et al 2003) and is actually completely absent in the coverage of some diseases (Clarke 2006).…”

“…Some scholarly research has supported this perspective (Krishnatray and Gadekar 2014;da Silva Medeiros and Massarani 2010), but most of the literature suggests that in fact, during health crises journalists tend to defer to public health authorities and to follow their lead in sounding the alarm to the mass public (Forsyth et al 2012;Klemm, Hartmann, and Das 2019;Staniland and Smith 2013;Briggs and Hallin 2016). Health crises, like security crises or natural disasters, are in this sense "sphere of consensus" events in the terms of Hallin (1986), and tend to generate cooperation between media and public authorities, suspension of watchdog roles and bracketing of partisan divisions (Hallin, Figenschou, and Thorbjørnsrud 2021).…”

“…While news sourcing research has a long tradition and has contributed to our understanding of the voices that dominate both everyday news (Reich 2009;Fisher 2018) and health crises (e.g. Hallin, Figenschou, and Thorbjørnsrud 2021;Briggs and Hallin 2016), it also presents important limitations. First, studies on news sourcing have not systematically considered the extent to which the expansion of social media has changed the way journalists and the media source the news, and comparative efforts have focussed on traditional media platforms (Nwakpu, Ezema, and Ogbodo 2020) or specific digital platforms (Quandt et al 2020), more than across the social platforms that the media use to inform the public.…”

“…Investigating news sourcing of a single pandemic across the digital platforms used by the media in different parts of the world provides valuable information about the dynamic that surrounds the role of the media in the construction of health as an object of public discussion (Hallin, Figenschou, and Thorbjørnsrud 2021). This approach also elucidates its potential impact on society, especially given the extensive debates about the plurality of voices in the news.…”