Abstract
This edited collection of research explores how Scandinavian media—television, newspapers, social media—depict health. It is divided into four parts: personalized service journalism; health, identity, and stigma; media and health politics; and covering and coping with crises.
Part 1 focuses on how newspaper journalists rely on individual stories or personalization and assign responsibility in their coverage of health. Chapter 1 examines the different framing strategies Norway’s current newspapers use in print and social media contexts. While print newspaper articles attribute responsibility for health to individuals, newspapers’ social media content emphasizes public health policy and assigns responsibility to politicians and other authorities. Chapter 2 provides an historical overview of Norwegian newspapers’ and magazines’ health-related content over a 100-year period. Conclusions suggest that health content correlates positively with content directed at women. A focus on physical health is concurrent with medical advances, such as vaccine development, as well as cultural acceptance of public health as good politics. Within this medical and political infrastructure, responsibility for good physical health shifts from a social to an individual responsibility.
Part 2 goes beyond a physical construct of health to focus on mental health. As such, chapters delve into mental illness and associated stigma, discourse around homosexuality, and how doping is depicted as a moral issue. Chapter 4 offers a case study comprising 3 weeks of coverage by the Danish newspaper, Politiken, that focused on destigmatizing mental illness by allowing affected individuals to share their stories. Using personal stories was meant to be empowering and destigmatize mental illness, but structural limitations inherent in mediated content forced a reliance on predefined categories even as journalists tried to avoid them. Chapter 5 analyzes the content and critiques of Jævla homo, a Norwegian public broadcasting documentary series, through a discursive performance lens. It identifies three discourses that have emerged from literature—homopolitical, homonormative, and radical queer—and uses them to characterize the program’s content as well as journalists’ reviews of the program. Chapter 6 investigates national and local coverage of a Norwegian weightlifter’s doping case. Compared with a previous doping incident involving a Norwegian cross-country skier, this story received little coverage, the researcher suggests, because the athlete in question was an immigrant from Uganda and weightlifting is a minor sport.
Part 3 examines politicization of health care decisions. Chapter 7 focuses on Norwegian news coverage of egg donation and assisted reproduction that relied on personal stories. While most sources used in Norwegian media coverage are official (74%), this chapter specifically sought out and examined stories that used at least one source who had personal experience with egg donation. Such tactics can “normalize” assisted reproduction but reduce the ethical dilemma to subjective, rather than objective, explanations. Chapter 8 examines a social media campaign by parents caring for severely ill children aimed at Norwegian politicians looking to cut social welfare services these parents and their children depend on. This lay campaign, “We are more than numbers,” leveraged the power of social media to permit parents to control the narratives about their children’s illnesses. This focus on individual control limited journalistic coverage of the campaign to existing narratives and raised many ethical questions regarding privacy and vulnerable populations as well as journalistic practices. Chapter 9 examines Finnish online news coverage of the nexus of technology and health information in digital applications and software. Finland’s economy is highly dependent on technological innovation, which the authors contend contrasts with the tendency of health journalism to focus on human welfare. In their examination of three online news sites—a commercial media group, Finland’s Department for Health and Welfare, and Finland’s most prominent newspaper—the researchers found much of the coverage focuses on technological innovation and growth rather than privacy concerns, benefits of digitized health self-care, or how technology could improve patient–practitioner communication.
Part 4 delves into coverage of health crises, including Ebola and trauma. Chapter 10 examines how the 2014 threat of Ebola was depicted verbally and visually in Danish and Norwegian online newspapers. The researchers found official sources dominated coverage. Verbal and visual depictions differed depending on geographic proximity; stories close to home emphasized statistics and controllability while stories about West Africa focused on the unpredictability of the disease as it ravaged the population. The final chapter looks at the traumatization journalists can experience as well as the inner conflicts that can arise as journalists cover crises such as school shootings and terroristic attacks. The authors suggest longitudinal studies that will uncover risk factors as well as protective factors for post-traumatic stress disorder.
This book would be a welcome addition to a health communication class, particularly one that examines global health journalism. It is written clearly enough that the book would be appropriate for advanced undergraduates or graduate students. Furthermore, individual chapters could be assigned independent of the other chapters in a section because they all follow a similar structure to journal articles, with an abstract, literature review, method, findings, and discussion.