Constructing a 'good death' : news media framing of the euthanasia debate from 1975 to 1997

Social and legal acceptance of euthanasia—including physician-assisted suicide has picked up considerable momentum in the 20th century. Among the most important chroniclers and shapers of cultural attitudes, beliefs, and values about issues such as euthanasia are the mainstream news media. The purpose of this study is to examine the national, print news media's role in conditioning public knowledge abouteuthanasia and its consequences. To accomplish this task, news framing analysis wasconducted of all Time and Newsweek euthanasia articles published in the roughlytwo-decade period between the two major United States Supreme Court cases thatencase this controversial issue (the 1976 Quinlan case and the Court's 1997 decisionupholding state laws prohibiting physician-assisted suicide). Using a variety of framing strategies advanced by framing theorists, 57 stories were analyzed according to their dominant frames and ideological positions. In order to explore the dynamic between the' news media and social change processes, shifts in framing stages overtime were also charted, and special attention was devoted to assessing some of the factors triggering these changes.Results showed dominant frames to reflect pro-euthanasia views in air but a few of the stories analyzed, a phenomenon that held true throughout the two decades of research. Moreover, journalists represented this highly complex and emotionally laden issue through two basic frames: medicine and law. Given the broad spectrum of topics euthanasia encompasses—including metaphysics, philosophy, ethics, sociology,psychology, and religion—such narrow coverage raises troubling questions. Unliketheir forebears, whose exposure to death was intimate and commonplace, individuals in late 20th-century America know about death primarily through the mass media. Yet news consumers relying on the mainstream news publications in this study for information on euthanasia were offered a meager selection of perspectives and positions from which to assess this critically important issue.