Scolding John Q.: Articulating a Normative Relationship between Politics and Entertainment

Abstract

The 2002 hostage drama John Q. triggered a discussion among journalists, the public, and the policy community about the proper relationship between politics and entertainment. In this debate the criteria for good journalism and good political discourse were frequently invoked to evaluate this Hollywood film. This discussion, which spilled out of the film criticism pages into news and commentary pages, shows how public-sphere models of political discourse are privileged even though they may not be a good fit for fictional media. John Q.’s success in triggering public discussion and awareness about health policy issues seems to illustrate DeLuca & Peeples’s (2002) claim that the “public screen” is a more useful metaphor for thinking about politics than the public sphere (Habermas, 1989). John Q. seemed to particularly raise the ire of critics because of its unambiguous critique of domestic policy and its implicit suggestion that collective solutions are needed.

The author would like to thank Michael Delli Carpini and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript.

Notes

The author would like to thank Michael Delli Carpini and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript.

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation is a nonprofit, private foundation that focuses on health care issues in the United States, and is not affiliated in any way with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries. See http://www.kff.org/ for more information.

The impact that John Q. may have had beyond those who actually saw the movie is suggested by the results of the Kaiser Foundation’s survey conducted in June of 2002, which found that while only 6 percent of the random sample had seen the film, 44 percent of respondents had heard of it (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2002b).

The study found that 78 percent of policy-related interactions involved ethical issues, 13 percent involved resource-related topics, and 9 percent involved both (Turow & Gans, 2002, p. 15).