Tet offensive: winning hearts and minds for prevention: Discourse and ideology in Vietnamʹs “Health” Newspaper

A quantitative content (CA) and qualitative discourse analysis (DA) was made of all 67 articles in the February 1995 (“Tet”) issue of Suc Khoe (“Health”), a bi-weekly newspaper issued by Ministry of Health, Hanoi, Vietnam. The aim was to uncover discursive strategies used in the construction of health-related meaning during a period of rapid economic transition and latent ideological struggle in Vietnam. The DA was based on the work of i.a. Foucault, Fairclough, Thompson, and Fowler. The CA showed a strong domination of Western sources. There were four themes: prevention, cure, the Tet festival, and crime and punishment. In the two first, health-related groups, prevention (n=31) dominated over cure (n=22), modern (n=19) over traditional (n=13) medicine, and overall, the theme of continuity (prevention and crime/punishment) over change (cure and Tet), reflecting Vietnamʹs programmatic pluralism in the health field and its ideological struggle against outside influences. The DA revealed three mixed but unintegrated discourses in the material; “popular” (simplistic, authoritarian, and sentimentalizing), “expert” (technical, egalitarian, and uncritical), and “nationalist” (administrative, impersonal and propagandistic). Prevention was mainly expressed via the popular discourse, whereas cure was represented, prospectively, by the expert discourse, and retrospectively, by the nationalist discourse. This combined order of discourse functions, we suggest, as a disciplinary “Discourses of Order”. A proposed integrative CA/DA model relates content themes and discursive foci to the classical rhetorical dichotomy hope/fear. We see “Health” as struggling to uphold traditional besieged values under the new economic policies by using preventive propaganda in both medical and political terms. These findings are compared with expressed editorial policy statements.