Socio-Moral Continuity and the Representation of Alcoholism in Four Major American Print Media Sources

Abstract

Scholars have long attempted to explain the factors that lead to alcoholism. Indeed, various attempts to characterize alcoholism have been made including the moral model, the temperance model, the disease model, the harm reduction model, the social education model, and the neurobiological model. Since the introduction of the disease model, it has gained wide consensus in the scientific and therapeutic communities, although not in the public at large. In fact, the public seem to be committed primarily to the moral model and to the public health model secondarily, based on the inordinate influence that broadcast and news media have on society. In this study, articles from four major American newspapers are subject to an exploratory content analysis using constructed random samples to explore how these articles portray alcoholism. The presented results show that of a sample of 881 articles, only seven characterize alcoholism as a disease. Given the persistence of the moral model, in the face of the alternative scientific/therapeutic consensus, the theoretical construct of “socio-moral continuity” is introduced.