Mixed Messages Call For Healthy Skepticism
by Norman Solomon
Dissident Voice
January 16, 2003
A special issue of Time, the nation's biggest newsmagazine,
was filled with health information in mid-January, offering plenty of encouragement
under the rubric of medical science with an ethereal twist: "How Your Mind
Can Heal Your Body."
The spread on
"The Power of Mood" begins with this teaser: "Lifting your
spirits can be potent medicine. How to make it work for you." An article
about "Mother Nature's Little Helpers" is a discussion of alternative
remedies. Other pieces probe techniques of psychotherapy, investigate high-tech
ways of scanning the brain, and ponder "Are Your Genes to Blame?"
Of course, more
than altruism is at work here. While the Jan. 20 issue of Time contains page
after page of informative journalism, it also includes dozens of lucrative
full-color ads pegged to the theme of health. There are elaborate pitches for laxative
capsules, a purple pill for heartburn, over-the-counter sinus medication, and
prescription drugs for allergies and Alzheimer's. On a preventative note,
there's even a full-page ad for an inhaler that "helps you beat cigarette
cravings one at a time" and another for a "stop smoking lozenge."
While all this
was going on inside Time magazine, the same kind of advertising appeared in
Newsweek to harmonize with its cover's keynote: "What Science Tells Us
About Food and Health."
We may feel that
it's nice of America's largest-circulation news weeklies to print so much
healthful information. But if you picked up the previous week's Time and turned
past the cover, the first thing you saw was a two-page layout for Camels, with
the heading "Pleasure to Burn."
Like the
multi-entendre slogan, the ad's graphic is inviting; a handsome guy, presumably
quite debonaire as he stands next to a liquor shelf, lights up a cigarette as
he eyes the camera.
And
so it goes. Many big media outlets tell us how to make ourselves healthy while
encouraging us to make ourselves sick. They offer us tips and new scientific
data on how to maximize longevity. But overall complicity with the lethal
cigarette industry -- whether through glamorization or silence -- is widespread
and ongoing.
The media's
mixed messages about health are unabashedly self-contradictory, but they're
also customary to such an extent that they're integral to a media cycle that
never quits. The same news organizations that produce innumerable downbeat
stories about obesity in America are beholden to huge quantities of ad revenue
from fast food -- and usually wink at the most popular artery-clogging chains.
If most people are ignorant of the deep-fried dangers posed by McDonald's and Burger
King, they can thank the news media for dodging the matter.
With television,
radio and print media now devoting plenty of coverage to health concerns, and
with aging baby boomers serving as a massive demographic target, the media
emphasis is tilted toward high-end health expectations. But we need much more
than news about the latest theories and scientific findings on preventative
measures, palliatives and cures.
Until news
outlets shift their commitments, they will continue to undermine public health
as well as promote it. The present-day contradictions are severe: Journalists
do not equivocate about cancer; we all understand that there's nothing good
about the disease. Yet journalists routinely go easy on proven causes of
cancer, such as cigarettes and an array of commercially promoted chemicals with
carcinogenic effects.
Air pollution
from gas-guzzling vehicles certainly qualifies as cancer-causing. But for every
drop of ink that explores such causality, countless gallons are devoted to
convincing Americans that they should own air-fouling trucks or SUVs. While the
health-oriented front covers of Time and Newsweek now on the stands are
similar, the back covers are identical -- an advertisement for Chevy's
Silverado diesel truck. The headline trumpets the appeal: "A Sledgehammer
in a Ballpeen World."
In a 1986 essay,
the American writer Wallace Stegner wrote: "Neither the country nor the
society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running,
and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership
but of belonging."
Such outlooks
are antithetical to the functional precepts of the media industry. It is
largely dedicated to "raiding and running." It perceives quiet as
dead air and squandered space. It portrays ownership as the essence of success
and human worth. How healthy can such operative values be?
Norman Solomon is co-author (with Reese Erlich) of Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You, which will be published in late
January by Context Books. Email: mediabeat@igc.org