Global Warming and the Problem of Public Opinion

We hear references to “public opinion” all the time but we rarely reflect on what it is, and why it’s important.
Political thinkers have struggled over the meaning of public opinion since antiquity. Plato was deeply distrustful of the public, while Aristotle believed “the many … may yet taken all together be better than the few.” [...]

Purple Pills and Puffery

This post is about promotionalism and the pharmaceutical industry. Some of the ideas come from a paper I wrote a couple of years ago (This Ad May be Bad for Your Health) published as a chapter in my book Communication in Question. I was compelled to revisit some of the ideas that informed the paper [...]

Thank You for Smoking

In what must be a sign that public health advocates are making big gains in the legal and PR battles against Big Tobacco, news today that the biggest cancer purveyor in the U.S., Philip Morris, has taken the City of San Francisco to court over a new bylaw banning sales of cigarettes in pharmacies.

The company [...]

Disease Surveillance 2.0

In the first meeting of my grad seminar on communication and public health we discussed the contributions of some leading social theorists (Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), particularly their theories of governmentality (Foucault), risk (Beck, Giddens) and reflexivity (also Beck, Giddens).
A recent story in Wired magazine illustrates some of these ideas well. The piece [...]

Politicizing the public service a danger to public health

Two news items today worth noting. The first story, from the front page of the Ottawa Citizen, reports that the Tories have clamped down on public servants during the election, “muzzling” them from speaking at conferences, to scientific meetings, or in other public engagements. The story quotes Myriam Massabki, a spokesperson with the Privy Council [...]

Public Health Gets its Groove On

A story published in yesterday’s Washington Post reports that for the “global generation,” public health is a “hot field” of research. Although this demographic isn’t defined, let’s assume that it comprises primarily university and college-educated youth with a cosmopolitan sensibility. Echoing some of the conceptual underpinnings of Ulrich Beck’s second modernity thesis, the notion that the processes of [...]

Low Hazard/High Outrage?

A public health crisis or a crisis in communication? The listeriosis outbreak in Canada lends credence to Peter Sandman’s formula that risk f = hazard + outrage. Expectations of a growing death toll were confirmed today with news of an infant death in Manitoba. Yet just yesterday morning the issue seemed to be dipping below the [...]