Congratulations to Professor Dan Hallin on the publication of his new book, Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life (Routledge 2016) co-authored with Charles L. Briggs, professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.
Publisher’s Blurb
This book examines the relationship between media and medicine, considering the fundamental role of news coverage in constructing wider cultural understandings of health and disease. The authors advance the notion of ‘biomediatization’ and demonstrate how health knowledge is co-produced through connections between dispersed sites and forms of expertise. The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content analysis and ethnographic data on the production and circulation of health news, drawing on work with journalists, clinicians, health officials, medical researchers, marketers, and audiences. The volume provides students and scholars with unique insight into the significance and complexity of what health news does and how it is created.
Endorsements
“This fresh, vivid, and surprising book will change how you think about the massive circulation of news about health and disease. Drawing on extensive knowledge and research, Briggs and Hallin show how the tight suturing of biomedicine and the media powerfully affects our culture, our politics, and our identities.”
– Steven Epstein, Northwestern University, USA
“No work within media theory until now has seriously explored how media and health domains might be transforming each other. Briggs and Hallin call for serious attention to how ‘the media’ is enacted deep in professional domains, and their intervention promises to take debates about mediatization to a new, more sophisticated level. Their books offers a remarkable combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies applied to an impressive media sample and a wide ranging set of interviews. This may well prove to be one of the most significant empirical studies of media and society in the past two decades.”
– Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK