Chapter 7 explores the labels associated with mental illness in more detail, specifically through naming analysis. I discuss prescribed forms for referring to people with mental illness (such as person-first language) and explore the frequency of such prescribed forms in the corpus. In addition, salient naming strategies in the corpus, particularly the labels ‘patient’, ‘sufferer’ and ‘victim’ are investigated. Using corpus evidence, I show that these labels are patterned to specific illness types. Furthermore, I argue that the tendency in the corpus to refer to people as quantities and statistics depersonalises people with mental illness. I argue that the ‘rhetoric of quantification’ (Fowler, 1991: 166) provides a way for the press to sensationalise news events related to mental illness which in turn constitutes the representation of mental illness as a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1973).

In 2018, New York Magazine ran an article titled “Donald Trump Is Destroying My Marriage” (Langmuir 2018). The piece featured first-person stories from four individual people and two couples discussing how politics in general – but Trump’s 2016 election in particular – created tension in their relationships. The people featured in these stories discussed disagreements with their partners over the political issues of the day (though other disagreements could be better classified as arguments over care responsibilities in a marriage). For some of the people featured, these disagreements led to divorce. Donald Trump, wrote author Molly Langmuir in the article’s introduction to the personal stories, “sent shockwaves through heterosexual romance.”

The media plays an important role in the communication and perception of health issues, and this chapter explores ways to incorporate the media into health promotion campaigns. It compares and contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of different communication channels, and provides concrete advice on how to develop a communication strategy and write a press release. It also considers how to identify the news value in your health communication.

This chapter poses the question of whether news values can serve a contemporary media environment that is chaotic, crowded and noisy. Drawing on examples from the 2016 American presidential campaign, Stephanie Craft and Morten Stinus Kristensen argue that norms of impact, conflict and novelty are increasingly incompatible with a media environment that demands and rewards sharing news incrementally and repeatedly, treating every new piece of information with breaking news intensity. These mismatched values are further fueled by commercial pressures that favor such values, as well as by bad faith actors who seek to game these values to steer coverage in ways that promote their causes or muddy public understanding of core issues. Rather than advocating for a return to a romanticized simpler time of journalistic gatekeeping power and professional authority over news, Craft and Kristensen argue that journalists and journalism educators need to rethink some of the basic premises of journalistic norms and practices, with the aim of developing news values better able to provide publics with the information necessary for political life to function.