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Media, Medicine, Citizen, Capital: Theorizing the Production of Health and 

Disease  

Review by William J. Robertson 

 

Making Health Public: How News Coverage is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life  

by Charles L. Briggs & Daniel C. Hallin 

Routledge, 2016 

 

In Making Health Public: How News Coverage is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life, 

Charles L. Briggs and Daniel C. Hallin engage in a collaborative interdisciplinary project aimed at 

illuminating the co-constitutive nature of media and medicine in the contemporary world. Briggs, a 

linguistic and medical anthropologist, and Hallin, a media and journalism scholar, have created a text 

that beautifully illustrates how health communication does more than simply convey biomedical 

knowledge to the public but actually takes part in ongoing processes of medical practice and 

knowledge production. Building on their past work on biocommunicability (Briggs & Hallin 2007; see 

also Briggs 2011), the authors introduce the concept of biomediatization to argue that biomedicine and 

the media are not two separate entities but instead work in tandem to produce bodies, medical spaces, 

and social relations more broadly. 

 The text is divided into two parts, each with three chapters, bookended by introduction and 

conclusion chapters. The Introduction succinctly and clearly lays out a map of the arguments and 

evidence that are presented in more detail in the main body of the text. It also provides some details 

about how the authors began working together and the bodies of literature they bring to bear on the 

project as well as a detailed explanation of the authors’ three methodological/analytical approaches. 

First, they compiled and analyzed a massive set of news content, primarily from the mainstream media, 

to better understand the role of media in the creation and circulation of public understandings of health. 

Second, they have been engaged in ethnographic data collection since 2003, including interviewing 



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people in the media (e.g., reporters and editors) and health professionals (e.g., clinicians and health 

administrators) as well as engaging in participant observation in public health offices to observe how 

media shapes agendas and practices that inform the public’s perception of health and disease. Third, 

they examined websites, polls and surveys by health organizations, and conducted focus groups to 

gauge the reception of health media among the public. Each of these approaches supports and informs 

the others in important ways such that none of them alone would have been enough to support the 

claims the authors make. 

Part I lays out the authors’ theoretical framework in a lucid and engaging manner. Chapter 1 reviews 

the concept of biocommunicability, which refers to the ways biomedical knowledge is created, 

circulates, and is received. The authors discuss three types of “biocommunicable models,” which they 

use to explore the complex and interwoven issues of biomedical authority, patient consumerism, and 

citizenship. The ultimate argument of the chapter is that such models play a performative role in 

shaping and producing bodies and social relations, and they begin to theorize the specific ways this 

performativity occurs in Chapter 2 by introducing the concept of biomediatization. 

Biomediatization is meant to complement and extend biocommunicability in that biocommunicability 

tends to treat the media and medicine as two separate though interactional entities, but biomediatization 

draws attention to how the two are actually deeply intertwined to extent that they are both implicated in 

the production of medical knowledge, the practices of medicine and public health, and in the 

construction of bodies and social relationships. Chapter 2 grounds this theorization in ethnographic 

data, and the authors share some of their own experiences to help contextualize biomediatization in 

quotidian life. 

Shifting back to a more analytical tone, Chapter 3 explores issues of genre and framing in health media, 

paying particular attention to how journalists deal with (and, indeed, reproduce) biomedical authority. 

Far from simply engaging in representational and informational practices that present unbiased 

reporting on health and medicine, Briggs & Hallin demonstrate how health news is framed in socially, 

culturally, politically, and morally loaded ways. To do this, they analyzed health news on network 

television and coded each story as fitting into one of three frames: (1) a Biomedical Frame for when a 

story focused on biological causality or technological interventions; (2) a Lifestyle Frame for when a 

story emphasized an individual’s life choices; and (3) a Social Frame for when a story emphasized 

social causes (e.g., political or economic structures) outside of individual control. Perhaps 

unsurprisingly, they found the Biomedical Frame was the most dominant. Briggs and Hallin thus argue 

that processes of biomediatization uphold and reproduce biomedical authority not just over health and 



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illness but other domains of life as well, though this happens in nuanced ways. 

 Part II contains three chapters that each present a different case study where Briggs & Hallin 

demonstrate the usefulness of the framework laid out in Part I. Chapter 4 focuses on the 2009 H1N1 

(also known as “swine flu”) pandemic and interrogates the roles reporters played in producing diseases 

as social objects, especially in relation to issues of the state and biosecurity. Chapter 5 focuses on the 

pharmaceutical industry, paying close attention to the role of journalism in the merging of biomedicine 

and capitalism. Chapter 6 explores the ways health journalists invoke “post-racial” thinking to produce 

normative models of citizenship that often foreclose racial and ethnic minorities from access to such 

citizenship due to “cultural barriers” and indeed are themselves complicit in processes of racialization. 

These case studies reveal the power of biomediatization by providing concrete examples of the co-

constitution of diseases through both biomedicine and media in both past and ongoing biopolitical 

issues. 

 The Conclusion briefly re-summarizes their main arguments and provides a few parting 

comments about some of the authors’ concerns and hopes for the kinds of work this text might 

encourage. Perhaps the most important take-away message from the concluding chapter is how 

biomediatization “involves neither the colonization of media by biomedicine, nor the other way around, 

but the creation of a complex field of boundary-objects and hybrid practices” (207), reminding readers 

that health news is an object that both journalists and biomedical professionals have in common, which 

is indicative of the entanglement of seemingly disparate social fields that include journalism, public 

health, biomedicine, consumerism, and citizenship. 

Briggs and Hallin have provided an important conceptual framework that can be applied in many 

different contexts using a variety of methods (as demonstrated in their case studies). While their 

methods are appropriate for the scope of their project (built on over a decade of collaboration), their 

methods could also be useful for shorter projects as well. Their different areas of expertise have 

allowed them to create a unique text that is suited for a wide-ranging audience, which might include 

anthropologists, communication studies scholars, other social scientists and humanities scholars, 

clinicians, people in public health fields, journalists, activists, and the public. For anthropologists 

specifically, this text could be useful for those interested in biomedicalization, media and journalism, 

the sociocultural production of health and disease, language and communication, citizenship, 

biopolitics, political economy, professionalism and expertise, knowledge production, and 

performativity. The text’s engaging and accessible writing would make it a good fit for undergraduate 

and graduate courses alike. 



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 Ultimately, Briggs and Hallin have crafted a well-written and engaging text that provides a 

useful framework for studying health and disease in the 21st century. This book has the potential to 

inspire anthropologists to take more seriously the role of media in the production and circulation of 

medical and lay knowledge about health and disease. Biomediatization is an especially valuable 

contribution to medical anthropology, and the concept could easily take a place alongside and re-shape 

understandings of many popular conceptual frameworks in medical anthropology such as 

biomedicalization, biocommunicability, embodiment, performativity/enactment, and 

pharmaceuticalization. 

 

References Cited 

Briggs, Charles L. 

 2011 Biocommunicability. In A Companion to Medical Anthropology, eds. M. Singer & P. I. 

 Erickson. New York: Blackwell Publishing. 459-476. 

 

Briggs, Charles L. and Daniel C. Hallin 

 2007 Biocommunicability: The Neoliberal Subject and its Contradictions in News Coverage of 

 Health Issues. Social Text 25(4): 43-66. 

 

William J. Robertson is a PhD Candidate in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. 

His research interests involve questions concerning how biomedical knowledge and practice are 

wrapped up in the production and reproduction of sex/gender and sexuality. 

 

 

© 2017 William J. Robertson 


