‘Alcohol short-circuits important part of the brain’: Swedish newspaper representations of biomedical alcohol research

Abstract

The media has a central role in communicating and constructing health knowledge, including communicating research findings related to alcohol consumption. However, research on news reporting about alcohol is still a relatively small field; in particular, there are few studies of the reporting of biomedical alcohol and drug research, despite the assumed increasing popularity of biomedical perspectives in public discourse in general. The present article addresses the representational ‘devices’ used in Swedish press reporting about biomedical alcohol research, drawing on qualitative thematic analysis of the topics, metaphors, and optimist versus critical frames used in presenting biomedical research findings. In general, the press discourse focuses on genetic factors related to alcohol problems, on the role of the brain and the reward system in addiction, and on medication for treating alcohol problems. Metaphors of ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reprograming’ of the reward system are used to describe how the brain’s function is altered in addiction, whereas metaphors of ‘undeserved reward’ and ‘shortcuts’ to pleasure are used to describe alcohol’s effects on the brain. The study indicates that aspects of the Swedish press discourse of biomedical alcohol research invite reductionism, but that this result could be understood from the point of view of both the social organization of reporting and the intersection of reporting, science, and everyday understandings rather than from the point of view of the news articles only. Moreover, some characteristics of the media portrayals leave room for interpretation, calling for research on the meanings ascribed to metaphors of addiction in everyday interaction.

Keywords:

• Media
• qualitative analysis
• alcohol

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Anders Ledberg for valuable comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The author reports that she has no conflicts of interests.

Funding

This research was funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, 10.13039/501100001861 [Grant 2010-0989].

Notes

1 The year 1995 was chosen for strategic and practical reasons; first, biomedical addiction research started to gain increasing media attention around the middle of the 1990s (Midanik & Room 2005); second, 1995 is the first year when all the four newspapers are indexed in Mediearkivet.

2 The search terms were all in Swedish, and were translated into English in preparing this paper.