Abstract
Charles L. Briggs, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Daniel C. Hallin, a communication scholar at the University of California, San Diego, approach coverage of health and biomedicine using multiple methods—including ethnography, focus groups, and content analysis. They locate these methods within a framework of concepts they describe as biocommunicability and biomediatization. The former they define as “the cultural models of health knowledge and its circulation that are projected in health news, along with myriad other sites.” They examine U.S.-based and international health communication using “rationality, agency, and modernity.” The contextual foundation of the framework lies in biomediatization, including “social contexts of capitalism . . . or racial formations” and how journalists work together with public relations practitioners, medical professionals, activists, and others to “reshape our conceptions of health, illness, life, death, and the body.”
Exploring theoretical underpinnings from cultural understandings about health to message framing and political economy, the authors offer three chapters summarizing the research to establish their framework of biocommunicability and biomediatization. For example, they discuss the agenda-setting role played by elite publications such as the New York Times, the interplay of roles inherent in television correspondents who are both physicians and journalists, and the dance undertaken between health-oriented public relations professionals and journalists who rely on their expertise in health and medicine. The authors also discuss source credibility as it relates to biomedical authorities and how patients, laypersons, and caregivers, while used, are rarely seen as authoritative sources unless they possess another characteristic, such as celebrity, that lends them trustworthiness.
The authors offer three case studies to elucidate their framework: the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, reporting on the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, and representations of race and ethnicity in health coverage.
In the first case study—the 2009 H1N1 epidemic—the authors found media coverage traveled through generally understood stages of health news coverage, from sounding an alarm to showing “containment” through “Othering.” They depict H1N1 as a good example of health news coverage and a “‘success’ for legacy media.”
In the second case study, focusing on reporting on the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, the authors identify two types of what they call “boundary work,” defined as drawing lines among the domains of science, health, medicine, and journalism. They argue that journalists who cover biotech tend to depict these domains as coexisting peacefully, whereas journalists who cover “big pharma” tend to be more critical, draw more strict boundaries, and act more often as watchdogs.
In the third case study, which focused on race and ethnicity, the authors found that health was depicted primarily through a white lens, leading them to interview diverse health-oriented public relations professionals to elicit opportunities for change. Four main ideas came from these interviews, including interviewees’ desire to “confront racism and health inequities,” decrease stereotypes and illusions of post-racialism, decrease the use of binary depictions of race and ethnicity, and expose the fallacy that health news is health education. The authors conclude that because “all of us are part of biomediatization networks, and we all fall under the spell of biocommunicable models . . . challenging dominant biocommunicable models can thus lead to more innovative health journalism.”
The authors’ mixed methods approach to health communication research offers a different approach to the study of health communication. The authors use international and domestic case studies to help readers understand biocommunicable models and biomediatization. As such, it would be a helpful resource for graduate students of health communication.