| dc.description.abstract | The advent of medical journalism was initially felt to be an answer to the problem of
communicating health and medical information to the public. However, currently, there is a
concern among scientists with the way the media, newspapers in particular, communicate
health and medical information. The concern of the medical community in particular and of
the scientific community in general is that newspapers ‘distort’ health and medical
information. In order to deal with this ‘perceived’ problem, scientists adopt a mechanical
view and propose to solve it by issuing guidelines for journalists to follow when writing
health and medical news. Close investigation of journalistic practice shows that many of the
proposed guidelines are already present in journalistic practice, and yet, the concern for
‘distortion’ remains. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to this issue. Adopting an
Applied Linguistics perspective, more specifically, using the discourse analytic methodology
of Genre Analysis, the thesis demonstrates that Health and Medical News Reports are first
and foremost news stories and that the proposed guidelines fail to achieve the envisaged
changes precisely because they seem to be ignorant of this essential reality. In order to reach
this conclusion, Genre Analysis is applied to different types of texts with a view to
comparing their structures. Some of the text types used have already been described in the
literature, but others are analysed for the first time in this thesis. Thus, comparison is made
between Health and Medical Research Articles and Health and Medical News Reports,
between Popularised Health and Medical Texts and Health and Medical News Reports,
between News Texts and Health and Medical News Reports and between Health and
Medical Press Releases and Health and Medical News Reports. Genre Analysis shows that
Health and Medical News Reports are first and foremost news stories and, therefore, that the
discourse of ‘distortion’ is somewhat ‘misguided’. However, because of its nature as a
structural analysis, Genre Analysis leaves one important question unanswered, namely the
‘why’ of the discourse of distortion. Although it is beyond the scope of this thesis to
investigate this question, in the thesis, it is indicated that a more context-sensitive analysis,
using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for example, could fruitfully be pursued. This
thesis draws on four types of data. The main data set consists of Health and Medical News
Reports published in The Herald and The Guardian between April and May 2007, where
possible, corresponding press releases were collected. Email interviews were conducted with
authors whose research was reported in the two newspapers. Finally, ethnographic
observation of newsrooms and face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with
journalists who wrote the reports over a period of one week. | en |
