Help Yourself: The Individualization of Responsibility in Current Health Journalism

Abstract

Who is responsible when you get sick? Doctors, who can treat you with superior knowledge? Politicians, who have designed the welfare services? Yourself, who should take steps to live a healthy lifestyle? Or perhaps illness is largely a matter of genetics and coincidence and therefore not a question of responsibility at all? Health journalism plays an important role in constructing such ideas of responsibility. This chapter explores how the Norwegian tabloids VG and Dagbladet present health issues verbally and visually on their print front pages and in their Facebook feeds. Through quantitative and qualitative content analysis, we find that the print front pages address the readers as individuals who ought to take certain actions to stay healthy. The Facebook feeds, on the other hand, prioritize stories about health politics and other societal matters. One of the explanations for this difference may be that the news you pay for differs from the news you may share in social media. However, even the Facebook stories do not touch upon socioeconomic factors, genetic dispositions, or sheer coincidence as reasons for health problems. Instead, structural flaws are pinned to decisions made by particular politicians. As such, an overall discourse of individual responsibility is sustained on Facebook as well, while more overarching structural explanations do not find their way to our everyday news experiences.

Whose stories are told and who is made responsible? Human-interest framing in health journalism in Norway, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.

“…The fact that we have studied newspapers, and not other more commercially oriented outlets might have an impact here. Other studies find that framing health as a result of individual lifestyle is indeed prevalent on front pages (Hågvar and Alnæs, 2020) and in popular magazines and online entertainment sites (Stroobant et al, 2016). Finally, and contrary to previous studies (Clarke et al, 2003; Iyengar, 1994), we did not find that human- interest framing was negatively related to social framing.…”

Fire diskurser om korona

“…Som regel er hovedpersonen en kjendis, og nyhetsverdien ligger nettopp i at det er en kjent person som har blitt syk eller snakker ut. Derfor har jeg tidligere brukt begrepet «kjendisdiskursen» (Hågvar & Alnaes, 2020). I koronajournalistik-ken finner vi imidlertid også slike saker om helt vanlige mennesker.…”

“…Likevel handler de aller fleste av disse samfunnssakene om politiske avgjørelser, der enkeltpersoner kan stilles til ansvar. Svaert få saker vektlegger sosioøkonomiske spørsmål eller andre former for strukturelle forklaringer (Hågvar & Alnaes, 2020).…”

“…Laptopen går igjen og skal muligens signalisere hjemmekontor. Bildene viser altså først og fremst det perfekte resultatet leseren kan oppnå, istedenfor problemet som må løses, noe som er vanlig i forbrukerdiskursen (Hågvar & Alnaes, 2020).…”

“…VGs artikkel blir et eksempel på det samfunnsperspektivet som medieforskere ofte etterlyser i helsejournalistikken (Hågvar & Alnaes, 2020). Likevel griper ikke artikkelen tak i selve samfunnsproblemet, nemlig hvordan man kan unngå at bestemte grupper må bo så trangt.…”