Help Yourself: The Individualization of Responsibility in Current Health Journalism
Original version
Hågvar, Alnæs: Help Yourself: The Individualization of Responsibility in Current Health Journalism. In: Hornmoen H, Fonn BK, Hyde-Clarke N, Hågvar YB. Media Health. The Personal in Public Stories, 2020. Universitetsforlaget https://doi.org/10.18261/9788215040844-2020-3Abstract
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.
Publisher
UniversitetsforlagetScandinavian University Press