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 idoliza
Trade Review
The triptych title encapsulates what's in store in this short and tightly written volume. Its initial chapters on the history of head injuries in football take account of their role in defining masculinity in the early 20th century, and public health advocates will appreciate the comparisons between the campaign to bring public attention to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the campaigns waged around tobacco and HIV/AIDS. The media studies leg of this book documents how news organizations transmit scientific findings to the public, pressuring policy makers to change government and corporate behavior. In the case of CTE, Bell (Univ. of South Florida), Applequist (Univ. of South Florida), and Dotson-Pierson (Univ. of South Carolina) detail the formation of a “media storm” that prompted a March 2016 congressional forum on concussions in sport, leading to the NFL’s first acknowledgment of the problem. The fact that the media, and even popular culture in some cases, incites the public interest behind congressional action—not science—will surprise some readers.
Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students.
* CHOICE *
Travis 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
