Health Reporting as Political Reporting: Neoliberalism, New Social Movements, and Regimes of "Biocommunicability".

This paper explores multiple regimes of "biocommunicability" in news coverage of health issues. Through discourse and quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage, we look at how news texts create differing subject positions in health discourse, embedded in differing ideologies about who is authorized to create and circulate public knowledge about health. In an earlier paper, we argue that neoliberalism has lead to the hierarchical "doctor's orders" model of biocommunicability giving way to an "active patient-consumer" model, and explore contradictions that arise from the clash between the ideology of scientific authority and professional responsibility and that of the market. Here we show how the weakening of biomedical authority not only by the market, but also by social movements and the rights revolution sometimes propduces a "public sphere" model of biocommunicability in which citizens are seen as participants in democratic debate about health issues, and show how this model interacts with the other two in health care coverage. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]