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Lee B. Becker
GENERAL EDITOR
Vol. 21
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The Mass Communication and Journalism series is part of the Peter Lang Media and Communication list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.
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Lesa Hatley Major and Stacie Meihaus Jankowski
Health News and Responsibility
How Frames Create Blame
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2019037074
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
ISSN 2153-2761
ISBN 978-1-4331-4092-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4083-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4093-8 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4248-2 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4249-9 (mobi)
DOI 10.3726/b16213
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All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
About the authors
Lesa Hatley Major is Associate Professor in the Media School at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She has published extensively on news framing and health issues. She worked as a journalist for years before earning her PhD in mass communication and public affairs.
Stacie Meihaus Jankowski is Assistant Professor of Journalism in the College of Informatics at Northern Kentucky University. Her main research focuses on media framing, particularly involving health issues. Her journalism experience informs her teaching in media law and media ethics. She received her PhD from Indiana University.
About the book
Who the public blames for health problems determines who the public believes is responsible for solving those health problems. Health policies targeting the broader public are the most effective way to improve health. The research approach described in this book will increase public support for critical health policies. The authors systematically organized and analyzed 25 years of thematic and episodic framing research in health news to create an approach to reframe responsibility in health news in order to gain public support for health policies. They apply their method to two of the top health issues in world—obesity and mental health—and conclude by discussing future research and plans for working with other health scholars, health practitioners, and journalists.
“In this long-overdue book, Lesa Hatley Major and Stacie Meihaus Jankowski reassert the central role that news media play in circulating and forming the frames of reference that people, professionals, and policy-makers rely on to understand, address, and solve pressing health-related problems. Through empirical analyses of framing in the health communication literature and through their own empirical demonstrations on the topics of obesity and depression, Major and Jankowski provide a nuanced account of an information environment in which seminal frames—thematic and episodic— interweave with the subtle language of gain/loss and responsibility/blame. On display, too, are the authors’ own professional experiences in journalism, which bring to the volume an authoritative rendering of newsroom norms and professional practices that shape journalists’ pivotal story-telling role. This fully conceived, richly researched, and timely book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in health communication.”—Paul D’Angelo, Professor of Media and Political Communication, The College of New Jersey
Citability of the eBook
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction: This Is a Health Communication Book?
Chapter Two: Good Pictures vs. Talking Heads: Iyengar’s Episodic and Thematic Frames
Chapter Three: Research on Thematic and Episodic Frames: The Health News Connection
Thematic and Episodic Frames in Health News
The Key Outcome: Support for Public Policy
Journalists and Framing in Health News
Assessing the State of Thematic/Episodic Framing Research on Health News
Definitions and Operationalization
Generic and Issue-specific Frames