Popular Media and Health: Images, Effects, and Institutions

Abstract

As the use of health, illness and medicine to attract audiences and advertising revenue escalates (Radley, Lupton, & Ritter, 1997), advertisement, entertainment, and news media are increasingly becoming saturated with health messages.2 Today most networksand newspapers have a correspondent who covers medicine and health as a regular beat (Grossberg, Wartella, & Whitney, 1998, p. 84), and health magazines are the second fastest growing category of magazines, escalating from 169 titles in 1988 to 494 titles in 1998 (Magazine Publishers of America, 2000). In May 2001, a quick search of the Internet using the search engine Yahoo with the term health turned up over 12,000 categories, 22,000 sites, and one million web pages. While a good number of these Web sites are created by health promotion specialists seeking to persuade individuals to engage in specific health-related behaviors, others may serve informative, advertising, and entertainment functions. Moreover, there has been no dearth of entertainment programming dedicated to medical dramatizations since “Medic” premiered in the 1950s.