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Science in the News:

Journalists' Constructions of Passive Smoking as a Social Problem

Institute for Health Policy Studies, Laurel Heights Campus, University of California, San Francisco, Box 0936, San Francisco, California 94143-0936, USA; fax: +1 415 476 0705; rmalone{at}itsa.ucsf.edu

Elizabeth Boyd

Institute for Health Policy Studies, Laurel Heights Campus, University of California, San Francisco, Box 0936, San Francisco, California 94143-0936, USA; fax: +1 415 476 0705; eaboyd{at}itsa.ucsf.edu

Lisa A. Bero

Institute for Health Policy Studies, Laurel Heights Campus, University of California, San Francisco, Box 0936, San Francisco, California 94143-0936, USA; fax: +1 415 476 0705; bero{at}medicine.ucsf.edu

News media play critical rôles in public understandings of health issues. Media presentation of scientific evidence seems to involve the `facts', which are then discussed and interpreted by various `experts'. From an ethnomethodological or social constructionist perspective, however, news `facts' themselves are socially constituted. Examining how health science is reported thus offers important insight into the social construction of health policy problems. We offer an interpretive account of United States newspaper coverage of passive smoking during a time in which several major scientific studies of the issue were conducted and reported upon. We argue that newspaper journalists, through the use of several rhetorical devices, constructed an account of the passive smoking issue in which scientific `facts' were less important than moral `facts'. Rather than (or sometimes, in addition to) explicating science, newspaper coverage conveyed a moral narrative highlighting tensions between American cultural values of individual liberty and protection of the public health.

Key Words: media • policy • social problems • tobacco industry

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 30, No. 5, 713-735 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/030631200030005003


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