Book Review
Media and health
Clive Seale
ISBN: 0-0761947-3-0,; 2002; 244, pages; London: Sage,;
Deborah Lupton
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, and Biopolitics of Science Network, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW
According to the blurb on the back of Media and Health, the book focuses on the importance of health messages in the popular mass media to audiences' understandings of health, illness and health care, bringing together 'the latest thinking in the field of media studies and the sociology of health and illness'. The book contains nine short chapters, beginning with an overview of how health education researchers, on the one hand, and media researchers, on the other, view the media's role in reproducing understandings and meanings about health and illness. This chapter is followed by an overview of patterns in the ways health issues are reported, such as dominant oppositions, narrative themes and metaphors, and a third chapter looking at the evidence for inaccuracy in media representations. The remaining six chapters are each more specific and, apart from the fourth chapter on danger, fear and uncertainty, mainly organised around central figures or archetypes in media coverage: villains and freaks; innocent victims; professional heroes; ordinary heroes; and 'real' men and women respectively. Within these chapters, numerous health topics receive attention, including cancer, mental illness, disability, HIV/AIDS, women's, men's, older people's and children's health, medicines and drugs, food scares, infectious disease, consumerism, the new genetics and environmental dangers.
The book certainly achieves its objective in summarising the latest research in the area of media and health, at least in relation to those studies that have attempted to analyse media content. In this area it is very well researched, with Seale referring to many previous analyses on health in the media in western countries (including Australia). Seale himself has conducted several relevant studies, upon which he draws in the book. As a result of this extensive use of previous research, the book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the topic of how the popular media represent health and medical issues. However, the downside of this approach is that it does read for much of time as a giant literature review: 'Smith found ...', 'Brown says ...', 'Jones' study suggests ...' and so on. I also found it quite odd that although Seale sensibly argues throughout his book about the importance of studies of 'audience uses of and responses to media health imagery, and the relationship of these to everyday life' and ends the book by suggesting that these are the 'way forward', he does not include a detailed review of relevant research that has already been carried out.
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