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88 5 MEDIA REPRESENTATION AND COCHLEAR IMPLANTATION Linda Komesaroff The daily press has been reporting on cochlear implantation for more than two decades. In doing so, it has not only reflected but also shaped the representations of deafness as well as constructed particular views of deaf people and cochlear implantation. Deaf people have sought access to and inclusion in the media and have, at times, successfully engaged in “textual relationships of power” (Luke 2000, 449). This chapter draws on a comprehensive analysis of media articles to show how key issues related to implantation have been represented to the public. An analysis of media representation provides insight into how power works in society and the ways in which the media is implicated in maintaining inequalities . For example, textual analysis of media articles on cochlear implantation has identified the way in which particular versions of reality are constructed and how readers are positioned in relation to that world (Komesaroff 2002). An analysis of the representation of deafness in the Australian press from 1982 to 2003 identified the dominance of the medical-disability model of deafness over the ”sociocultural ” model in articles related to childhood implantation (Power 2005). The study reported in this chapter extends the scope and focus of this type of analysis to articles on cochlear implantation published since 1982. The newspaper databases Factiva and Newsbank were searched for the term cochlear in all regions of the world. The earliest article located was published in 1982, and the search identified more than 7,000 articles on Factiva alone; the search term cochlear implant yielded 2,426 articles. Given the significantly reduced number of articles located with this latter term, the broader term cochlear was used and irrelevant articles were removed manually. Articles that related only to financial reviews, listings on the stock exchange, and contract tenders or articles that did not relate to cochlear implantation were identified on the basis of headline and lead paragraph . Multiple listings of articles within or across both databases were also removed manually. The search resulted in slightly more than a hundred articles identified from the 1980s, hundreds from the 1990s, and thousands from the 2000s (on average, more than 1,000 articles have been published each year since 2000). The first stage of the study, reported in this chapter, includes an analysis of all relevant articles identified from the period of the 1980s, totaling 114 articles. Further articles published since the early 1990s were selected on the basis of searches done on keywords related to issues or themes that arose during the study (including terms such as meningitis, implant-related deaths and use of particular language such as miracle cure). Most articles indexed in the databases were published in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, which is unsurprising given the United States and Australian origins of cochlear implant developers: Dr. William House, the U.S. otologist who produced the first wearable single-channel implant in 1969, and Professor Graeme Clark, who pioneered the multichannel cochlear implant, the first device implanted in 1978. Through a process of grounded theory (that is, starting with empirical data without preconceived theories), key categories were identified from the hundreds of articles analyzed in this study (categories such as “expectations,” “reported outcomes,” “historical events”; further subcategories were identified, including “expectations of parents” and “expectations of professionals”). Sections of text were tagged according to the identified categories and the themes that emerged during the analysis. This process often required multiple readings of the text and the recoding of articles as key categories were identified and clarified. The focus of data analysis was on the anticipated benefits of implantation, the reported outcomes of implantation (anecdotal and science-based), the shifting criteria for implantation, technological developments, financial imperatives, and the representation of deafness and the response by Deaf people. The results presented in this chapter primarily focus on the first decade of media reports, with some reference made to more recent articles where relevant. This focus enables an historical account of implantation and allows one to view the outcomes of implantation (reported at the time) with the benefit of hindsight. That is, the claims made of implantation when it first became publicly available and gained U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval can be contrasted with later reports of actual accounts from implant recipients, their parents, and cochlear implant professionals. It is also instructive to review the path taken by a multibillion dollar industry (world leader Cochlear Corporation reporting sales revenues...

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