CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic

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CTE, 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 NFLs 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 Tobaccos manufacturing of doubt through faulty science. This book argues that the continued aspiration and idolization of the NFL, and its lack of accountability for health concerns surrounding brain injuries, highlight the firm grasp of hegemonic masculinity on the ideology of American football - further problematizing medias glorification of the sport. Scholars of sports media, health communication, and general media studies will find this book particularly useful to discuss longitudinal effects of media framing centered on critical health risks in sport and the challenge of translating accurate scientific knowledge to the public domain.

Reviews

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 NFLs first acknowledgment of the problem. The fact that the media, and even popular culture in some cases, incites the public interest behind congressional actionnot sciencewill 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 (Americas 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 importshowing 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

Author Bio

Travis R. Bell is assistant professor of digital and sports media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications at the University of South Florida.


Janelle Applequist is assistant professor of advertising in the Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications at the University of South Florida.


Christian Dotson-Pierson is speech instructor at the University of South Carolina.