Medical ethics in the media.

Abstract

The mass media function both as reflector and a shaper of a society's attitudes and values and as such represent a forum within which one may understand and influence public opinion. While questions of medical ethics may be largely confined to academic and scientific spaces, their importance to society at large cannot be denied, and how issues of medical ethics play out--if at all--in the media could tell us how society understands and processes these questions. This paper uses the techniques of framing analysis and textual analysis to examine how the print media, represented by two major Indian newspapers, cover medical ethics. The study looked at all articles related to medical research over a three-month period (January-March 2007) and considered how the story was framed, what were the key threads followed, and the dominant themes focused on. The ethical frame is notable by its absence, even in articles related to controversial themes such as drug research and genetics. Discussion of ethics appears to be problematic given the adherence to traditional "news values" when covering science and medicine. The research community and the media need to pay more attention to explicitly focusing on ethics in their interactions.