Health News and Responsibility

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.

List of Tables – Preface – Acknowledgments – Introduction: This Is a Health Communication Book? – Good Pictures vs. Talking Heads: Iyengar’s Episodic and Thematic Frames – Research on Thematic and Episodic Frames: The Health – 25 Years of Thematic and Episodic: A Content Analysis of the Scholarly Research in Academic Journals – The Integrated Process of Framing: An Approach to Organize and Evaluate – Feast or Famine: A Qualitative Analysis of 25 Years of Thematic and Episodic Research in Academic Journals – Thematic and Episodic Frames in Obesity News: Findings from Three Studies – Thematic and Episodic Frames in Depression News: Findings from Two Studies – Conclusions: What Have We Learned and a Path Forward with These Frames – Index.

"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