Project Approach
This project explores how the media cover health, illness and medicine, over time and in different countries. Today, media stories on health and illness are omnipresent across multiple media platforms, and never before have we had access to such plethora of information about health.
HeCoRe analyzes:
(i) how representations of health and illness have changed over time, (ii) what characterizes dominant health reporting internationally, and (iii) how the media impact power relations, policies and perceptions of health.
Through thick descriptions and a closely-knit mixed-methods design, the project aims to illuminate how authoritative perceptions of health and illness have been articulated, challenged and changed in the media over time; how different health institutions, interest groups and individuals adapt to, employ and take advantage of ‘old’ mass- and ‘new’ social media; the opportunities and challenges stakeholders face in this hybrid media landscape; and how a current communication regime characterized by personal narrative, conflict and emotions challenge traditional medical hierarchies and knowledge regimes.
Relevant publications
Briggs, C. L., & Hallin, D. C. (2016). Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life. London and New York: Routledge.
Hallin, D. C., Brandt, M., & Briggs, C. L. (2013). Biomedicalization and the public sphere: Newspaper coverage of health and medicine, 1960s–2000s. Social Science & Medicine, 96(0), 121-128. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.07.030
Hallin, D. C., & Briggs, C. L. (2015). Transcending the medical/media opposition in research on news coverage of health and medicine. Media, Culture & Society, 37(1), 85-100.