Baker, P, Brookes, G, Atanasova, D et al. (1 more author) (2020) Changing frames of obesity in the UK press 2008–2017. Social Science & Medicine, 264. 113403. p. 113403. ISSN 0277-9536
Abstract
Obesity is a persistently newsworthy topic for the UK press and in recent years levels of coverage have increased. In this study, we examine the ways in which obesity has been framed by the press over a ten-year period (2008–2017), focussing both on areas of stability and change. The analysis is based on a ~36 million-word database of all UK newspaper articles mentioning the words ‘obese’ or ‘obesity’ published within this time frame and draws upon techniques from corpus linguistics – a collection of computational methods for examining recurrent linguistic patterns in large bodies of language data. Our analysis shows that, over time, obesity is represented increasingly as a biomedical problem that is both caused and should be prevented by individual action. Meanwhile, focus on wider environmental determinants of health, including the role of Government and the food industry, decreases over time. In the paper, we situate these trends within the wider context of UK society and argue that they both represent the increasing dominance of neoliberal models of health but also have the potential to contribute to weight stigma and the blaming of individuals. Accordingly, it is argued that the press should seek greater balance in its reporting of the potential causes of and solutions to obesity, as well as closer alignment with scientific evidence. By doing so, the press could begin to report on obesity in a way that raises useful public awareness around the topic and which challenges some of the stigma that currently attends to this social justice issue.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Obesity; Print media; Framing; Corpus linguistics; Neoliberalism; Stigma |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Oct 2020 13:24 |
Last Modified: | 08 Oct 2020 13:24 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113403 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:166284 |