“Superbugs” in the Risk Society: Assessing the Reflexive Function of North American Newspaper Coverage of Antimicrobial Resistance

Gabriela Capurro

doi:10.1177/2158244020901800

Abstract

This article examines how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is covered in four elite North American newspapers and whether the dailies act as sites of reflexive modernization. I draw on risk society theory to situate AMR as a modern risk and news media as key spaces for reflexivity. Through a qualitative content analysis of 89 news stories on AMR, this study shows that this risk is communicated through inaccurate definitions and oversimplified accounts of the causes, populations at risk, and preventive measures. Media representations of health risks affect public perceptions of risk and risk prevention. The dailies, however, seldom expressed reflexive modernization, a key function of “mass media” in the Risk Society, which I argue could be due to the very complexity of “modern risks.” Lack of reflexivity in the media regarding AMR could delay crucial policy and institutional changes necessary to tackle this risk.

Highlights

Antibiotics are one of the most important technologies of modern medicine
This study examines how the risk of Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is discursively constructed in four elite North American newspapers2—The Globe and Mail and the National Post in Canada, and The New York Times and The Washington Post in the United States—and whether the dailies expressed reflexive modernization
I examined how the risk of AMR is discursively constructed in four elite North American newspapers and whether these publications acted as sites for reflexive modernization, a necessary step for modifying our antibiotic consumption and assuming a stewardship mind-set

Summary

Introduction

Antibiotics are one of the most important technologies of modern medicine. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the greatest public health risks, threatening to make antibiotics useless. Resistance, the evolutionary defensive mechanism that allows bacteria to protect themselves against antibiotics’ power to kill them, “threatens the very core of modern medicine” In the last two decades, there has been an increase in multidrug resistant bacteria, which cause infections that do not respond to multiple antibiotics. Health authorities have described antibiotic resistance, and more broadly AMR, as a public health emergency caused by extensive antibiotic misuse, which has not been met with an prolific development of new antibiotics (O’Neill, 2016). Resistance to the few new drugs available is being developed (Cassir et al, 2014)

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