By Lucia Allen, News Correspondent
School of Law professor Richard Daynard and a team of researchers from the Northeastern Public Health Advocacy Institute of the school of law and will examine how personal responsibility rhetoric is used to block wide-scale public health measures.
Daynard, who will serve as principal investigator, received a $2.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) after filing a grant proposal late spring of 2008. He will collaborate with California-based Berkeley Media Studies Group in California.
‘It’s pretty unusual for a law professor to receive grants from NCI,’ he said. ‘Though this is my third one, I needed to explain how this research would contribute to reducing cancer rates in the US.’
Over five years, Daynard and his team will look at whether manufacturers have a strong incentive to undermine public health measures aimed at decreasing use of any tobacco products and over-consumption of sodas and fast foods – which both cause cancer and other chronic diseases, Daynard said.
‘ ‘The rhetoric of personal responsibility is very useful for this purpose. It resonates with conventional wisdom, [moving] responsibility away from the manufacturers, despite deceptive marketing and public relations campaigns they may have engaged in,’ Daynard said.
Mark Gottlieb, executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, is collaborating with the law school research group for the third time. Gottlieb is directing legal research, which includes looking at how personal responsibility rhetoric is used to protect the tobacco and food industries from lawsuits, and legislative and regulatory reforms.
‘They want to resist rule-making by administrative agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, or US Department of Agriculture,’ Gottlieb said. ‘These companies would prefer to let the market decide [and] not be blamed for the hundreds-of-billions of dollars related in health care costs, loss of productivity, and premature death.’
Such companies also want to improve their public relations, so consumers don’t abandon their stocks if they are a publicly traded company, Gottlieb said.
Laura Dorfman, co-principal investigator and executive director of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, will stay on for all five years of the study and will help in looking at how debate about personal responsibility and different policies surrounding the tobacco and food industries appears in litigation, legislation and the news.
‘We have a lot of social constraints that make it harder to eat healthy. Some of the arguments made around personal responsibility, distract from those issues,’ Dorfman said.
This kind of research is needed to improve the environment people live in, Dorfman said.
‘We have to understand how the policy debates occur and the parameters in the political environment [where] those public health policies … are made,’ Dorfman said.
The results will help people in public health understand the context in which public health is happening in either the political or social realm, Dorfman said.
Berkeley Media Studies Group’s mission is to study public health issues in the news and to apply those studies in helping public health advocates do a better job when talking to the media and policy-makers, according to the group’s website.
Gottlieb and his team have also identified landmark legislation, particularly important lawsuits against the tobacco and food industries. He and his team will examine internal files, the transcripts of hearings in Congress or state legislations, and trial-related public relation and media materials to code how these companies’ explain personal responsibility.
‘Public health officials and advocates will be able to design their proposals and campaigns to protect themselves against [rhetorical] personal responsibility attack[s] through this research,’ Daynard said.
‘
