4th Global Conference
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Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 5B: Health, Medicine and Media
Chair: Valerie Raoul
The Media Manufacturing The Sense of Health, Illness and Disease: Health Coverage
in Turkish Newspapers
Inci Cinarli and Elgiz
Yilmaz
Faculty of Communication, Public Relations Department, Galatasaray University,
Turkey
Health information received from the mass media which
can be used currently by health educators and providers to disseminate
relevant health information is rich in quantity but obviously poor in
quality. In particular newspapers, one of the most widespread forms of
print media and one of the major health information sources of the public,
shapes our perceptions on health, illness and disease inadequately. These
health messages of the news media mostly paradoxical and conflicting,
are quite far from being informative, public interested and profitable
because of the lack of information source’s
credibility, the non-specialization of health reporters, the translated
health news from developed country’s information sources and the
expectations created by news about new health technologies. Moreover,
dependency on foreign news sources, reproduce the significance health
and disease depending exterior.
This paper aims to present how newspapers
contribute the medical model of health and the individualized, sensationalized
and mostly commercialized “significance” of
it such as “life style” discourses, “miraculous cures”,
health “rituals” etc.
For the above end, a qualitative and
quantitative content analysis of health coverage in eight Turkish newspapers
will be conducted for the time period of the first three months of 2005,
examining the significance of health, illness and disease, manufactured
by the media.
Desirability and Its Discontents: Young
People’s
Responses to Media Images of Health, Beauty and Physical Perfection
Joe Grixti
School of Social and Cultural Studies, Massey University, Auckland,
New Zealand
Media images of ‘ideal’ body types and physical
appearance are often argued to lead to insecurity or unrealistic expectations
and even self-punishing behaviour among the young. In contexts where
the entertainment media focus on selling dreams of successful lifestyles
linked to images of attractive young men and women disporting themselves
in healthy abandon, those who do not fit these ‘norms’ often
come to be seen, and also come to see themselves, as the other. This
situation is particularly problematic for young people who suffer from
physical disabilities, but it is also critical for those who think of
themselves as too fat or too thin or not beautiful, etc.
The paper reports
on data from focus group interviews with 195 young people (aged 14 to
25) living in Malta, and examines the extent to which attitudes to body
image can be shown to be changing as a result of young people’s
complex engagements with commercially oriented and increasingly globalized
media images. The main focus is on how teenagers and young adults themselves
speak about their own bodies and physical appearances, and how their
self-worth and perceptions of others relate to recurring projections
of desirability in the media. The paper compares advertisers’ views
of what body images are appropriate for use in advertising with young
people’s changing perceptions of masculine and feminine desirability.
It argues that though the young often resist and ridicule media stereotypes
of physical perfection, their self-images are inevitably inflected by
the commercial imperatives of the entertainment industries and advertising.
Representations of “Newly Emerging” Infectious
Diseases in the British Newspapers
Peter Washer
Academic Centre for Medical Education, Royal Free and University College
Medical School, University College London,
London, United Kingdom
My paper examines the representations of two so called “newly emerging” infectious diseases in the British newspapers, using Social Representations Theory to elucidate how these new disease threats were conceptualised in the newspaper reporting and how they were explained to the UK public. The reporting of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and its human derivative disease variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (vCJD) between the period 1986 to 1996 is compared with the reporting of the 2003 SARS epidemic. This research examines who or what was said to be at risk from the new diseases and whether some individuals or groups were held to blame for the diseases’ putative origins; their appearance in human beings; and for their spread. In the SARS case, whilst there was a great deal of amplification of the risk by the media, at the same time the mechanism of ‘Othering’ enabled British readers to feel distanced from the threat of the new disease. The Chinese were said to be so different to us, so Other, that the British readers’ fears were diminished. In the BSE / vCJD case, the blame could not be externalised in the same way, at least from a British perspective, as BSE was a British phenomenon. In that case, blame was directed at the British government, farmers, and at the way we live now. The similarities and differences highlighted by comparison of how these two diseases were represented to the British public elucidates deeper concerns about the phenomena of ‘emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases’ over the past 30 or so years and suggests that these have impacted on the faith once widely that Western biomedicine could ‘conquer’ infectious disease.
Alcoholism: ‘Correction’ and the Changing
Notions of ‘Recovery’
Donavan
Rocher
Department of Communications, Concordia
University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Consuming alcoholic beverages is a common
practice in North American society
and is routinely associated with leisure time. At the same time, frequent
excessive
consumption, otherwise known as alcoholism, is most commonly described
in popular
discourses as being a disease. The ‘loss of control’ typified
by the alcoholic with respect
to drinking is described as being symptomatic of an ‘alcoholic
identity’. These ideas are
informed by the organization of Alcoholics Anonymous and the considerable
influence
that this organization has had on health care professionals and the institutions
that work
with individuals that are believed to suffer from this dependency. With
respect to
alcoholism, popular discourses of this 'disorder of desire' are presently
shifting in
Western societies due to recent scientific research and theory. Nikolas
Rose argues that
these new discourses of alcoholism describe it as a disorder requiring
'correction' for
genetic errors, rather than being a symptom of a deviant identity or,
in the terms of
Marianna Valverde, a 'disease of the will'
This paper will explore and support Rose’s argument by illustrating
how
contemporary scientific discourses about alcoholism are entering into
popular discourses.
By examining self-help literature, it is possible to trace the emergence
of new medical
theories and regimes of treatment for alcoholism as they begin to appear
in popular
culture. This paper will specifically examine the books: The Sober
Kitchen: Recipes and
Advice for a Lifetime of Sobriety, The Craving Brain – A Bold New
Approach to Breaking
Free from: Drug Addiction, Overeating, Alcoholism and Gambling
and The Serotonin
Solution. By exploring these texts, the intersections between the successful
popularization
of the serotonin hypothesis of depression and prescribed anti-depressants
and current
theories about alcoholism will be analyzed. Similarly to depression,
alcoholism is now
being theorized in terms of malfunctions in the neurotransmitter system.