CTE, Media, and the NFL by Travis R. Bell Janelle Applequist and Christian Dotson-Pierson

Author:Travis R. Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: undefined
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Causal Link

Moving beyond the headline and who was associated with CTE, this research wanted to understand if—and how—newspapers dissected the scientifically complex topic of CTE in detail. It is important to recognize this section focused on the disease and not sport. As Goodell (1987) explained, the role of media was to inform—not educate—about science, and they often limited how much background information reached the public. To better understand this journalistic process, this study explored if the news stories offered a cause for CTE. If so, what was the cause? Conversely, if a story did not offer a cause but inferred a link to a specific type of brain injury, which one was most frequently associated with CTE? These questions serve to better understand if newspapers filtered information, how did it position published, scientific understanding in its reporting? Moreover, was the information “variable and sometimes even contradictory” (Goodell, 1987, p. 586)?

Less than one in five articles (n = 14, 15.7 percent) that identified CTE in the headline offered an explicit cause of the disease. The specific use of “cause” was significant in this examination. The basic understanding of “cause” is to make something happen. Rhetorical authority was provided by this linguistic choice and many journalists chose to not offer that scientific detail to its readers. Within the fourteen articles, it was important to explore how the journalists attributed cause and if it aligned with scientific research. Eleven of the fourteen articles accurately reflected the scientific understanding that a repetitive act of trauma to the head was a cause that resulted in CTE. A few examples included “repeated blows to the head,” “repeated brain trauma,” and CTE was caused “both by big hits and a number of smaller, repetitive ones.” The stories that did not match the scientific causation were close but vague. One close explanation was provided in a quote by actor Will Smith, who portrayed Bennet Omalu in the movie Concussion, that related cause to sport. Smith said about the movie, “it’s going to change the way people see football, other sports that cause CTE.” The other two stories referenced that CTE was a result of “head trauma.” However, these stories failed to indicate repetition and that there was “no idea how many hits cause it” but still offered that hits to the head can result in CTE. The significant finding was that newspapers, on the occasions that they did provide a cause, were accurate in their reporting.

Beyond offering an explicit cause, media suggested several links to CTE using science terminology that defined various types of brain injuries (e.g., concussion, TBI, subconcussive, or repetitive). These findings offered significant variation in how journalists positioned a link to CTE and how it might occur. Within the eighty-nine articles that included CTE in a headline, nearly half of the stories suggested a link between either “trauma” (n = 43) or “concussion” (n = 42) and CTE. Conversely, “subconcussive” (n = 8) and “traumatic brain injury” (n = 5) were rarely linked to CTE. These findings were interesting for two reasons.

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