Health News and Responsibility How Frames Create Blame

"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