This article examines media characterizations of childhood lead poisoning as a window to the framing of an environmental health problem. The authors sampled newspaper coverage of childhood lead poisoning between 1991 and 1995 and used the data to describe how childhood lead poisoning is framed as a public health issue in news media, to explain how the framing has changed over time, and to discuss what is at stake in the contest to define childhood lead poisoning as a widespread public health problem. The analysis pays particular attention to the role of the environmental justice movement in this process. The authors show why an environmental injustice frame (some children are more at risk for lead poisoning than others), which is increasingly available in the culture, is unlikely to displace the dominant "silent epidemic" frame (all children are at risk) used in media coverage of childhood lead poisoning in the United States.
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