When Time magazine went culinary trend-spotting in July 1951, it bypassed usual suspects like new ice-cream flavors and found a truly cutting-edge trend: horsemeat for dinner. With beef prices high, butchers were selling hunks of “old grey mare.” So the magazine joined the fray and kicked in a cooking tip for pot roast of horse. “The meat tends to be sweet,” it observed, so “more onions should be used and fewer carrots.”
If the mid-century idea of munching on Mr. Ed sounds unpalatable today, it also points to the general peril of zeitgeist-chasing journalism—namely, that within a few years, the product you tout may become as dated as a recipe for, well, horsemeat. Such perishable press coverage not only risks becoming tomorrow’s red face, it can also be dangerous. That’s particularly true when it comes to drug coverage, where news breakers risk shouting hosannas to substances that end up bigger health gambles than they initially appeared.
Such was the case with LSD in the 1950s and 1960s, when the hallucinogen was the subject of long, loving stories in Time and Life magazines, many of which portrayed the mind-bending drug in wondrous terms, according to Miami University (of Ohio) journalism professor Stephen Siff. Writing in the latest edition of Journalism History, Siff finds that Time and Life were hooked on LSD, dedicating more coverage to it than other major newsweeklies, and lacing it all with heavy Christian imagery.
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That journalists run the risk of becoming mouthpieces for vested interests is sound reasoning, but it helps to know the agendas of all the players not just the ones who get the most press. Advocates of the social medicine theory of "medicalization" also have an agenda - rather than money, ideology is at the heart of the agenda. For well over a century proponents of this theory have advocated against artificial interventions (drugs, surgery and devices). An interesting example was the hue and cry over the invention of anesthesia in the mid-1800s. After all, it was natural to feel extreme pain during surgery and using such an artificial intervention was painted as a lack of character or even morals. The issue for journalists is not who is right or wrong, but rather understanding all points of view in order to be both accurate and balanced. The outcry against Big Pharma is but one example of a larger, long running war over how illness and disease should be defined in an age of greater technology.
Posted by Kate on Mon 5 Oct 2009 at 04:37 PM