Description
Book SynopsisCTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic examines the central role of media in constructing an entangled relationship between chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the National Football League (NFL), challenging a predominately symbiotic sports/media complex. The authors of this book analyze more than a decade of media coverage, along with three prominent films, to unpack how media discourse resurrects CTE, a preventable degenerative brain disease linked to boxing in 1928, and subsequently frames it as a football epidemic dating back to 2005.The authors position CTE as a public health crisis, whereby media coverage of CTE and the NFL's vigorous reliance on controversial published research by the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee parallels the moral panic of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and Big Tobacco's manufacturing of doubt through faulty science. This book argues that the continued aspiration and idolization of the NFL, and its lack of
Trade ReviewTravis R. Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson offer a compelling narrative of unstoppable force (America’s love of football) meeting the immovable object (accumulating evidence of the sport as a major health epidemic). This is a book of searing insight and import—showing the role media plays both in telling the uncomfortable stories and also in stifling them to keep the NFL party rolling. -- Andrew C. Billings, The University of Alabama
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Football and the Brain: A Historical Perspective Chapter 2: Framing Global Epidemics: A Case Study of HIV/AIDS and Big Tobacco Chapter 3: Hegemonic Masculinity: The Foundation of American Football Culture Chapter 4: From Punch-Drunk to CTE: The Evolution of a Brain Disease Chapter 5: Mediating Science: The Framing of CTE Chapter 6: Beyond the Headlines: CTE and the NFL Chapter 7: Film and Football: Creation and Critique of Violence Chapter 8: It’s a “Guy Thing”: Mediated Misconceptions
