Media and Health

How are health matters presented by the mass media? How accurate are the messages we are receiving? Media and Health demonstrates how health messages in popular mass media are important influences in our lives, and that they are not neutral, being subject to many determining influences. Media and Health demonstrates the importance of mass media for understanding the experience of illness, health and health care, bringing together the latest thinking in the field of media studies and the sociology of health and illness. Media and Health thus brings together both well known and lesser-known studies in the context of an integrated, sociological argument about the media and health messages. Modern experience is increasingly influenced by mass mediated communications, and nowhere is this more true than in bodily experience, illness and health care. Media and Health argues that media audiences occupy a variety of positions in relation to media representations, with 'effects' and 'active audience' models only telling part of the story.Media producers are influenced by a variety of experiences, from medical lobbies, scientific organizations, and not least the commercial pressure to satisfy mediasaturated audiences. These mean that aims of health promoters are not always easily achieved, leading to considerable tensions that require a deeper understanding of media health than has hitherto been applied to them. Clive Seale contends that no student of the contemporary experience of health and illness or of the place of media in the modern world, can afford to ignore these developments.