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Abstract
Obesity has become a mainstay of media in all its forms and sociologists and others have increasingly sought to understand what reporting on obesity can tell us about the construction of social problems, health, and health policy. In this commentary, I review recent social science writing on the representation of obesity in the media. I explore three dominant themes in this research, the framing of obesity in the media, media reporting of obesity research, and media characterizations of and reporting on obesity policy. I highlight the strengths of these studies and conclude with suggestions for further avenues of research.
Notes
1. Feminist scholars have long looked at the contradictions present in mass media coverage of weight and dieting, specifically the tandem promotion of super thinness and dieting alongside the promotion of ‘indulgent’ and processed foods (Spitzack Citation1990, Bordo Citation2004), yet it is only recently that these studies have expressly addressed obesity as a social problem. It is this focus that I explore in this commentary.
2. All of the studies I reviewed focused on the print media though some also included data from television news programs and images accompanying print media (Mastin and Campo Citation2006; Prividera and Godbold Kean Citation2008; Inthorn and Boyce Citation2010; Rich Citation2011; Gollust et al. Citation2012). Moreover, these studies tended to focus on national newspapers, particularly the New York Times given its place as a top national media source for policy makers as well as its reputation for health and science reporting. However, as I discuss later, changes in the media landscape also call for more scholarship on new forms of media as well as a better understanding of how information from traditional news sources is consumed and shared through social media.
3. Scholars have also explored ‘framing contests’ around obesity. That is, they have looked at how alternative framings beyond the three I have outlined here compete with these more dominant frames. See Saguy and Riley (Citation2005), Holland et al. (Citation2011).
4. As Holland et al. point out the flaws in the ‘Fat Bomb’ report are flaws that are commonly found in obesity research more generally, among them the tendency to conflate overweight and obesity, an uncritical reliance on the body mass index (BMI) as a measure of health, and problems in the selection of study populations (Citation2011).
