Review

The production of unreality

Media and Health
Clive Seale
Sage Publications, 2003. £18.99

This book aims to ‘bring together the field of media studies with that of the sociology and health and illness’. It does what it says on the packet.

Seale outlines assumptions about the nature of the ‘target audience’ of health promotion, the role mass media consumption plays in construction of identity, folk tales as enduring narrative structures, and the institutional and practical constraints on ‘telling stories’ on television or in newspapers.

This overview, while necessarily brief and skimping on the sociology of health and illness, is nuanced and extensively footnoted, allowing readers to follow the more esoteric debates for themselves. In later chapters Seale reviews research studies, some of which he himself led, on themes of health scares, representations of children as perfect (innocent) victims, the doctor as hero and more latterly villain, and the star-status of ‘consumer heroes’ who have conquered disease through willpower and lifestyle change.

The prose is clear and jargon-lite, but only becomes invigorating when the author tackles his favourite subject – the representations of cancer narratives (startlingly similar to tales of sporting triumph or disaster) in mass media. The final chapter, on gender, which tackles gender stereotypes, body shape, abortion, assisted contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation and menopause and, briefly, men’s health, feels slightly truncated and ‘bolted on’, as if it were a second book half-born.

However, his critique of some feminists’ notions of media portrayals of breast cancer treatment as purely oppressive is perhaps the highlight of the book.

This is an excellent introduction to the role that the media plays in reflecting and creating ‘commonsense’ and ‘alternative’ views to health and illness – ‘the production of unreality’ – that would be valuable to any practitioner, researcher, lecturer or student involved in improving individual or community health.

A second edition that had more to say about race and class, that historicised notions of mass media further and, most importantly, took perspectives from the non-English speaking world, would be most welcome.