To achieve an examination and analysis of media representations of various forms of parental resistance, and to illustrate how the media may influence and shape the construction of public reality, one particular newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, has been used as a main source of media related material in this chapter. This newspaper was deliberately targeted because, as Lupton (1995) suggests about the Sydney Morning Herald, “it is the best selling broadsheet in Sydney” [read ‘New Zealand’] (Lupton, 1995, p. 501). The New Zealand Herald’s readership figures of 522,000 are more than double that of the nearest rivals (AC Nielsen, 2000; Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 2000). Other texts extracted from special interest web sites, metropolitan, regional or national newspapers, and major news magazines (as recommended by Lupton & McClean, 1998) are used to give a local, regional or national viewpoint. In an examination of articles reporting cases that involve a high degree of parental resistance to medical advice53, the media presents a series of texts that are complex and contradictory54; they are also predominantly supportive of medical advice and intervention and often negative towards those parents that fail to accept such advice.
Media discourses vary from subtle and objective accounts of parental resistance to very personalised and emotive ones (Cleave, 1999, “Parents dice with boy’s life”; Johnston, 2000, “Teen backs chemotherapy”; NZPA, 2002, “Accused told police of Satan’s way”; NZPA, 2005, “Trial highlights clash between parental rights and medical advice”; Taylor & Chisholm, 2000,
53
For the most part, the five cases that are described in Chapter One are used to perform this analysis.
54
Bourdieu (1998b) suggests that the media has a selective memory, i.e. that vitriolic attacks against one course of action can suddenly change to support if the tide of public opinion is perceived to change.
“Suffer the little children”; Trevett, 2003, “Police probe death of ‘healed baby.’”). In the latter case, which predominates in the reporting of cases of radical parental resistance, ideas about ‘normal’ parental responses are often presented as symbolic or metaphorical self-evident sets of culturally accepted norms along with strategies and practices which tend to legitimise existing doctor-parent-child relationships. For instance, in restructuring complex material to assist in the understanding of difficult concepts, the media may incorporate metaphors or symbolic representations that give the audience an opportunity to examine the issue thereby either accepting it as a good way of thinking about the issue or not. If they accept the metaphor, then they may use it again in their everyday thinking about the issue. If not, then it will be rejected until a more acceptable metaphor is used. Subsequently, there remains a danger of public misunderstanding or even rejection of key, but complicated issues (such as parental resistance to medical treatment for a child), depending upon the use of deliberate symbolism by the media sources relating the material (Fowler, 1991; Lupton 1999). This style of media representation of news events reflects media discourses that are aimed at promoting naturalised and ‘self-evident’ values, attitudes and practices in a fashion that converts people (such as parents and doctors) into symbols or archetypes that ‘stand in’ for wider meanings and concerns (Lupton, 1999). In this way, media supports those attitudes and practices that are defined and maintained by hegemonic devices that are usually readily accepted by the public (Fairclough, 1989, 1999; Fowler, 1991). It may therefore be argued that media has the power to influence the public in ways that are both overt and covert.
The power of the media
The media, as a societal institution, ‘governs’ not only which information the public is to receive, but also ideas about legitimate versus illegitimate courses of action associated with an event. Arguing from the viewpoint of governmentality, Foucault (1991) maintains that major institutions (including the media) exert power and influence on the general populace by means of the adoption of broader strategies in governance both within the organisation and in public.55 For Bourdieu (1973), the media, state and other institutions merely compete for meta-capital over specific fields that are themselves nebulous. Nevertheless, Bourdieu was aware of the effects of both global and local discursive practices relayed through the media, and how these effects clearly connect to social and cultural practices (Bourdieu, 1998b; also Fairclough, 1995). Hence, the mass media not only provides an overt (but potentially false or misleading) sense of objectivity or cultural ‘normality’, but a covert sense of acceptable and non-acceptable
55
behaviours as well. In this fashion, large media agencies attempt to govern or control the behaviours of their audience, by means of influence and subtle manipulation that may commence with the use of linguistic symbols and end with shaping mass opinion through manipulations of how information is presented, when it is presented, and under which circumstances.56 For instance, in the following example, in what appears to be an objective or descriptive report, there are judgemental elements of normal and abnormal behaviours that are supported by the use of certain terms (i.e. the child ‘suffers’; the parents’ actions ‘cut his chances of survival’; medical specialists, through the police and social workers, are forced to ‘hunt’ for the family). Even members of the public are entreated to perform a civic duty by helping to find the family and report them to the police:
The parents of a 3-year-old cancer sufferer are cutting his chances of survival the longer they stay in hiding, say medical specialists. Police and social workers are hunting for Liam Williams- Holloway of Wanaka after a court order granted custody to the state when his parents failed to return from a trip to Auckland, where they had been seeking alternative treatment for him. He has a common form of children's cancer, neuroblastoma, which affects the nervous system, and began chemotherapy at Dunedin Hospital in November. His parents, Brendan Holloway and Trena Williams, had doctors' agreement to take him away for alternative treatment but were due back in Dunedin on January 25. Liam was to have had regular check-ups at the Starship children's hospital in Auckland while away from home. His last visit to the Starship was on January 9 and the family have not been seen since. The Family Court has now granted an application by doctors and given guardianship of Liam to the state youth agency, and, in a rare move, social workers have appealed to the public to help find him (Cleave, 1999).
Opinions differ concerning the overall effect of the mass media; according to one view, “audiences become pawns in the media's struggle for power” (Jones & Jones, 1999, p.188; see also Bourdieu, 1998b). Other viewpoints concerning the role of the media within society range from the media as a powerful influence on society to the media merely competing for attention with other institutions in a competitive market (Couldry, 2004). The news media are partly chronicling current affairs, as they usually claim, but also partly ‘fitting’ these stories into the discursive field (which, in Bourdieu’s [1998b] analysis, is a more general culturally focused environment) in order to seem trustworthy. In this activity, the media must articulate closely enough with their social settings; if they become too close (i.e. too personal), or too distant (i.e. too whimsical), then they may be considered to be either biased or ridiculous. As Foucault (1973) maintains, there are mechanisms within society (such as the medical profession, social work, psychiatry and others) that in conjunction with the popular media provide clarification of the symbolic boundaries between “Us” and “Them”, the licit and the illicit, the mad and the
56
As Bourdieu (1996) maintains, the (covert) public effect of the media stretches even farther because the media not only linguistically frames information, but ‘filters’ it as well - in that decisions are made about how much information should be presented to the public, how debates will be structured, what parameters will be employed, and by whom. In this fashion, mainstream media not only selects and presents a multiplicity of media events, but also influences the production of culture.
sane, or in the cases to be described later, the normal parent and the abnormal ones. These norms are defined by reference to the deviant, and there is now little doubt that modern mass media provides numerous examples of normalisation via problematisation. In this regard, it could be argued that the mass media has become a form of Foucaultian ‘Panopticon’ in that it constantly scans society for signs of deviance with the threat of punishment by disclosure. The greater the public position of the personality, or the more they are in the public gaze, the more likely the media will disclose their activities. In cases involving parents who are taken to court, the greater their resistance, and the consequences of their resistance, the more likely they will be noticed by the media. Furthermore, as if to emphasise the media role in promoting, surveilling and governing normality, the media makes full use of those professionals in society who seek to represent such norms:
The judges of normality are everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor- judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements (Foucault, quoted in Owen, 1994, p.181).
If such power to influence the behavioural responses or conduct of the general populace rests with major institutions - such as the media (and/or the medical profession, the law and others), then how then does the media present material that influences public opinion in such a fashion?
The methods of the media
The public acceptance or rejection of media reporting on a given phenomenon, such as parental resistance to medical advice is influenced by whom and by which means an issue is reported (Lupton, 1994b). In mainstream media, the tendency is to relate events in a style that presents the ‘expert’ position (law, medicine, or academia) as ‘the opinion’ by which other opinions are to be measured (or found wanting). What is popularly perceived to be authoritative truth in media is often supplied by experts in the field that the media selects to deliver an opinion that is often no more than a ‘sound bite’ or a significantly edited excerpt of a longer response (which Bourdieu, 1998b, calls “cultural fast-food”). Thus, the general public’s understanding of complicated heath related events is closely related to what the media tells them and by those media selected to do the telling. As Lupton (1995) notes: “People tend to rely on media accounts of medicine and public health to construct their knowledges when they have little personal experience of the issue or event” (p.501). Nevertheless, even when supplied with such accounts, the public do not always fully comprehend how the media construct representations of
what is and is not socially acceptable in significant societal issues.57 Then again, neither do public audiences always passively accept whatever the media presents (Fairclough, 1992, 1995). At face value, some will reject certain media representations of an issue, others will accept them, and yet others will remain largely indifferent. Public acceptance or rejection, uncertainty, indifference or resistance to media representations of complicated issues is in itself an expected societal norm. In any issue that contains conceptual or technical difficulty requiring considerable reflection that is either lost or misunderstood by the audience; there is a danger of what was extraordinary becoming ordinary, i.e. just another media product amongst millions of others that compete for our attention. Such homogeneity of media messages may therefore not only lead to public apathy towards anything deemed as too difficult to understand, but also to the danger of widespread acceptance of the given cultural message that arrives with the media event. The wider acceptance or rejection of media discourses is therefore dependent upon the ways in which these discourses are framed to shape interpretations of the facts or the ‘truth’ which therefore influences in turn public responsiveness to public issues such as parental resistance to medical treatments.
Media ‘framing’ of cases of parental resistance
Irrespective of the continuing debates about the degree of impact that the media has on public opinion (and the problem that public opinion is probably impossible to gauge beyond a certain level), some statements linking the media and its influence on public awareness and opinion remain appropriate within this thesis. As Cheek (2000) notes: “One group of texts that have been very influential in framing the parameters for discussion of contemporary health issues, and even to some extent determining what is a health issue in the first place, is the publications of articles in the mass media” (p. 43). Furthermore, individuals are socially located and gain their beliefsabout health and illness from the discourses and constructionsthat are available to them, including media discourses (Chapman & Lupton, 1994);media representations of health, illness and disease produceand reproduce meaning concerning health and illness for laypeople and professionals alike (Good, 1994; Seale, 1995); and media representations mediate individuals’ lived experiences (Lyons, 2000).58 It follows that the media has considerable
57 Public opinion research shows (with a few exceptions), that the commercial mass media has contributed little in
improving public understanding of either the science or the politics involved in significant societal controversies (Nisbit, Scheufele, Shanahan & Brossard, 2006),
58
Within the media, meaning making is socially constructed through institutions, including televisions networks, publishing houses and newspapers chains (Hoenisch, 2005). Yet, in their constructions, media implies meaning that is neither highly individually owned nor thoroughly examined for representative accuracy before it floods out into the mainstream. Thus, there is little room for any individual acting alone to project their own meaning into the media In resistance to medical directives, discursive marginalization of parental resistance of all forms is therefore quite likely.
influence in the shaping or guiding of public opinion on matters relating to health, medicine and parental decision making, especially in those situations where there is not only considerable human interest, but also a high degree of controversy.59
Those situations involving radical parental resistance that catch the public’s eye are nearly always firstly ‘framed’ by the media, and parents who resist medical advice in regard to their child’s treatment are cast by the media in a largely negative light. Their resistance is often seen as a deviation from the norm, against (sound) medical advice, social workers, the law and society itself, at the expense of the survival of their own child. When parents were portrayed differently (i.e. when conforming to medical desires on behalf of their child), they are often framed with their child as brave and/or heroic figures (Lupton, 1994b). Subsequently, the media portrays resisting parents quite differently to conforming ones. In the five cases under review, for example, the initial framing of cases parental resistance in headlines is often dramatic and suggestive of abnormal behaviours (see Figure 1, over page).
Parents who resist medical advice disrupt taken-for-granted routinised practices that occur within the medical setting and within the legal system. This disruption is therefore unwelcomed and puzzling for doctors who, faced by challenges to the limits of their own medical field (i.e. those sets of historical settlements that exist between parents and physicians about the ‘normal’ treatment of a seriously ill child), are exposed to a situation that they find inexplicable or disturbing. Such exposure is unwelcome because it challenges not only medical and legal habitus, but the medical and legal fields as well (Bourdieu, 1977a, 1984). To disrupt both is akin to disrupting the hidden mechanisms of two of the most established norms or even the utopian ideals of society, namely the ‘rightness’ of medicine and law, and in doing so, medicine and law identify, define and enforce societal norms. As Foucault (talking here of those deviants who occupy a ‘heterotopia’60) maintains:
...heterotopias of crisis are ...being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those [sites] in which individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed (Foucault, 1984a).
Parental behaviour that steps outside the norm and into a type of heteropia is therefore ‘problematised’ or made into an example of unacceptable difference by means such as labelling, normalising and appeals to governance (Foucault, 1991, 1994). The media plays its part in the
59 Four of the five ‘radical’ cases (i.e. Liam Williams Holloway, 1999-2000; Tovia Laufau, 1999-2000; Caleb
Moorhead, 2001-2002 and Caleb Tribble, 2003-2005) selected for analysis in this thesis offer examples of media driven attempts to shape public opinion.
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Foucault (1967/1984) saw heterotopias as places that exist probably in every culture and in every civilization which are something like counter-sites, where all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.
positioning of such parents through the use of mechanisms that firstly show how such parents are different from parents who conform, and secondly to illustrate their deviancy via means of constant comparison with the socio-cultural norms that exist between parents and physicians within medical settings. For example, in the television transcript of the Tribble case (see Figure Two, over page), normal and abnormal behaviours are presented in a variety of ways. The child was a ‘normal’ at birth – he “weighed a healthy 4.8 kilograms”, but (ab)normally was not taken to a doctor when ill; the parents were not ‘normal parents’ – they “chose a life of isolation” and “kept themselves to themselves”; and in a largely secular society, “believed that God would provide”. The child had a kidney infection that was a relatively “straight forward” one to treat, but the parents had (against the norm) chosen prayer instead of medicine; and the father himself confessed that he and his wife had not ‘conformed’ and were therefore liable to criticism and judgement (by the rest of society).
Figure 1: A selection of newspaper/web-based headlines concerning parental resistance, 1999–2005.
‘Parents dice with boy’s life’ (12 February, 1999).
‘Parents put boy's cancer into hands of god’ (12 October, 1999). ‘Parents beg to be left alone’ (13 February, 1999).
‘Liam case worried Mangare boy carers’ (15 October, 1999). ‘Doctors told to get tough on parents’ (17 October, 1999). ‘Cancer-stricken boy tried to jump from car’ (22 August, 2000). ‘Parents' agony over son they loved to death’ (25 August, 2000). ‘Use courts to hit lagging parents’ (26 August, 2000).
‘Parents face trial for manslaughter of 7 month old son’ (27 November, 2001). ‘Science, religion and a dying baby’ (6 June, 2002).
‘Measured response best way to help other children at risk’ (18 June, 2002). ‘Police probe death of ‘healed baby’’ (11 December, 2003).
‘Family thought baby was healed’ (15 December, 2003).
‘Parents in court for failing to provide necessaries of life (23 March, 2004). ‘Dead baby’s parents charged’ (27 February, 2004).
‘Family prayed to revive dead baby’ (18 December, 2004). ‘Jury struggles with Tribbles decision’ (18 November, 2005).