The Imperatives of Narrative: Health Interest Groups and Morality in Network News

This article examines some of the story conventions of network television news to explain the ways in which healthcare interest groups develop and maintain their presence in this medium—a process that has significant implications for public understanding of healthcare issues, and therefore to bioethics. The article is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on three major normative conventions of television news: adherence to a simple narrative structure, the balance ethic, and avoidance of the “think-piece” and outlines the basic strategies available to interest groups for exploiting these normative conventions. Section two introduces three case studies of organizations and individuals who have run high-profile media campaigns. Section three explores the implications for bioethics of the observations made in this article.