|
Article Excerpt
"As figure, metaphor constitutes a displacement and an extension of the meaning of words; its explanation is grounded in a theory of substitution."
--RICOEUR, 1978
Press coverage of addiction tends to be prolific if not always accurate or considered. This article examines the ways in which the always controversial area of methadone maintenance treatment is reported in three respected daily newspapers, the New York Times (US), the Times (London, UK) and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), to explore some of the ways in which methadone and methadone treatment programs are represented. What place does methadone occupy in Western liberal discourse? What does this place offer to policy and practice in terms of scope for the development of treatment, and to clients in terms of their status either as liberal subjects or as Others of liberalism? To conduct this analysis I have chosen to focus on the role of metaphor in articles on methadone treatment. As will become evident, metaphor is a central way in which meaning around methadone treatment is generated in these texts. This is not to say coverage of methadone treatment per se in the three papers under examination is voluminous, in fact, as I will be arguing, there is a particular kind of silence around the basics of the programs operating in each country. In part I ask what this silence means, and what effects the use of metaphor--both to figure methadone and to mobilize it as a figure for other phenomena--has in a context where addiction, including heroin addiction, is by contrast extensively discussed. In the process I consider the status of metaphor within Western liberal discourse, and trace the (in some respects damaging) ways in which methadone treatment can be seen not only as a resource for, and object of, metaphorical description and production, but itself as a kind of metaphor--a metaphor for heroin.
Approach
First it is necessary to ask a question whose answer is likely be considered self-evident by some: Why is it important to map and analyze media accounts of methadone? A commonsense response might be because these representations reflect specific understandings of it, influencing, by disseminating those understandings, the formation of policy and practice around it, and the esteem in which those who participate are held in society (McArthur, 1999). As Isabelle Stengers and Olivier Ralet (1997) have pointed out, public debate on drugs and drug treatment is regularly characterized in terms of a putative moral consensus: "Don't take drugs." Related to this, perceived public opposition to methadone treatment is frequently cited as grounds for timidity or reserve in policymaking.
The literature examining representations of drug use and drug treatments in the press tends to take this approach, with some very useful results. It finds, for example, that coverage of drug use and drug services is often poorly informed, unbalanced and inclined to reproduce stereotypes (Orcutt & Turner 1993; Elliott & Chapman 2000; Coomber, Morris & Dunn 2000; Treloar & Korner 2005; Korner & Treloar 2003). Thus, Orcutt & Turner look at the ways in which particular research findings on student drug use were distorted in the US press, and explore the creative choices, organizational circumstances and other factors that drove the distortions. Other literature on drugs and the media argues that policy is shaped in the context of, and even by, media reports (McArthur 1999; Elliott & Chapman 2000; Rowe 2002). Elliott & Chapman, for instance, explore media treatment of a proposed trial of prescribed heroin in the Australian Capital Territory, and the federal government's withdrawal of support for the trial. They argue that it is important to analyze the ways in which drug use is presented in the media because (to paraphrase the work of Ericson et al. whom they quote) the media provide commonsense understandings of deviance and societal options for, and limits on, managing deviance. McArthur also investigates the coverage of the proposed heroin trial, concluding that "sections of the media had a hand in its demise" (p. 153). Rowe examines a different period in press coverage of drug use, focusing on a flurry of reports in 1995 on a supposed heroin epidemic in Melbourne. He asserts that "'public opinion' and what the policy-making apparatus of governments understand to be real depends heavily on the mass media" (p. 38).
This literature resembles in some respects my own approach to the relationship between the media, policy, the views of members of the public, and drugs as material objects. I do, however, think it important to question this framing in that it tends to echo an unexamined inclination within Western thought to take for granted the ontological separateness of representation and reality, in this case, media discourse and drug use and drug treatment. For example, Elliott & Chapman (2000:193) ask "What was it about the nature of heroin users as portrayed in the press by supporters and opponents of the trial that may have contributed to a lack of political support for [the trial]?" Terms such as portrayal imply prior categories, in this case, the "nature of heroin users." While it is absolutely necessary to think about the ways in which media representations coproduce policy, daily life and politics, it is important not to reify "representation" and "reality" by treating them as separate entities with a priori attributes. Elsewhere (Fraser & Valentine 2006; Fraser 2006) I have argued that to account better for the role of material objects such as drugs in producing realities, a theorization of materiality is necessary that sees it as neither passive in the face of culture or discursivity, nor determining of it. In making these arguments I take inspiration from the work of Karen Barad (2003), whose concepts, as will become clear later, inform this article. Along with this different approach to the ontology of representation, the article departs significantly from the existing literature in two main ways. First, it is based on an international corpus of newspaper articles, and second, it focuses on the role of metaphor in generating meaning. As a result, the analysis takes a more abstract view of the production of meaning, looking at, for example, the role of images such as that of the silver bullet and its association with the occult. At the same time, the article shares with its forerunners a conviction that representation matters for the world and for individuals.
Method
The data analyzed here were drawn from three mainstream newspapers, the New York Times (NYT), the Times (London) and the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). The articles were gathered by searching the online database Factiva using the search term "methadone" and limiting the search to a two year period: 2004 to 2005. (1) All resulting citations (a total of 135) were retrieved in the first instance and examined for the purposes of this article. Those that made only isolated references to methadone in pieces of one paragraph or less, or were devoted to unrelated topics, were noted, and greater focus was placed on those articles that made more substantive references to methadone. This latter group included articles containing more than one reference to methadone, articles in which methadone was central to the overall story, and articles in which the reference to methadone was especially vivid, suggestive or idiosyncratic (a total of 77 articles--SMH: 29, Times: 27 and NYT: 21).
All three newspapers examined enjoy relatively high circulation and readership. The New York Times was the third highest daily circulation paper in the US for the six months ending September 30, 2005 (1,682,644). (2) The Times enjoyed the second highest daily circulation among "quality" newspapers in the United Kingdom for the period ending November 30, 2005 (671,666). (3) The Sydney Morning Herald had the highest daily circulation among quality newspapers in Australia during the six months ending March 31, 2006 (211,700). (4) Each is a longstanding and generally well respected daily journal, representing, for some, the liberal democratic ideals of journalistic independence and reasoned debate. In selecting these newspapers I leave unexplored representations of methadone in tabloid or "populist" journalism. There is no doubt that an interesting study could be made of the material found in tabloids, but, being obliged to limit the scale of my search for practical purposes, I chose to explore the ideas and assumptions operating in relatively sober newspaper discourse. It seems to me that there is a great deal to be learnt from the limits of some of Western liberal democracy's most trusted reporting.
In examining the metaphors used in references to methadone in the New York Times, the Times, and the Sydney Morning Herald during 2004 and 2005, it is important to emphasize that such references were relatively uncommon in all three, and that where they...
|
