Talking about Obesity: News Framing of Who Is Responsible for Causing and Fixing the Problem

Abstract

Analyzing newspaper articles and television news, we explore how American news media have framed the issue of obesity. More specifically, we analyze the way the media present the question of who is responsible for causing and fixing the problem. Our data reveal that over the last 10 years, mentions of personal causes and solutions significantly have outnumbered societal attributions of responsibility. Recently, however, a balance was established between individualistic and societal attributions of responsibility. Mentions of societal causes and solutions have increased considerably, whereas decreasing numbers of personal solutions have appeared in the media. Findings also indicate that television news is more likely than newspapers to mention personal solutions, but less likely to attribute the responsibility to society.

Notes

¹Sampling interval (k) was calculated by dividing the total number of news items by sample size. Every kth item then was selected into the sample.

²Lumping genetic conditions into the personal-cause category may obscure the underlying moral dimension, that is a big part of public discourse. Genetic/biological causes are acquired involuntarily; thus nobody blames obese people if they have a genetic or biological reason. It might be reasonable, therefore, to have genetic factors as a separate category in addition to personal and societal causes. We should emphasize, however, that our focus is on the question of who is responsible for causing obesity, but not necessarily who is to blame. Obese people with biological reasons may not be blamed for being obese. As far as who is responsible, however, the problem is attributed not to society but to these unfortunate individuals. Despite the conceptual concern, therefore, we opted to include the genetic factors into the personal-cause category.

³By designating exactly four categories of causes and solutions, we might have suppressed certain causes and solutions, particularly those that belong to the “others” category. For a number of reasons, however, we wanted to maintain the same number of categories (four) for each personal and societal attribution. First, designating a smaller number of categories may mean that we have more inclusive categories and it is likely that similar causes (or solutions) are grouped into the same category. In this case, mentions of those similar causes (or solutions) in a single news item are counted as one mention because we consider them as multiple mentions of the same attribution. Having a larger number of categories, on the other hand, may indicate that we have more specified and exclusive categories. It is likely in this case that similar causes (or solutions) are separated into different categories, and mentions of those similar attributions can be counted as more than one mention. We therefore had to maintain the same number of categories in order to avoid unnecessarily over- or undercounting a particular type of attribution, either personal or societal, simply by having a larger or smaller number of categories.

⁴The total number of unrelated items and duplicates was estimated from their proportions in the articles and transcripts sampled each year.

⁵These findings are consistent with a recent estimate from the International Food Information Council Foundation (2005), which shows a rapid increase in obesity news coverage over the last several years.

⁶The increase in television coverage between 1996 and 1997 is attributed in part to the fact that 1997 was the first year we included NBC into our analysis. NBC news transcripts are not fully available in the LexisNexis database for the years 1996 and earlier.

Note. NYT (The New York Times), WP (The Washington Post), CST (Chicago Sun-Times), SFC (The San Francisco Chronicle); HC (The Houston Chronicle). Entries are the number of articles or news programs mentioning each cause of obesity.

Note. NYT (The New York Times), WP (The Washington Post), CST (Chicago Sun-Times), SFC (The San Francisco Chronicle); HC (The Houston Chronicle). Entries are the number of articles or news programs mentioning each solution for obesity.

⁷Nonetheless, recent research indicates that the public has shown increasing support for societal solutions. Evans, Finkelstein, Kamerow, and Renaud (2005), for example, report that the large majority of their respondents favored restricting the availability of unhealthy foods in school vending machines (74%) and cafeterias (75%). Over 70% of the respondents were also in favor of small tax increase ($25) to support childhood obesity interventions. The majority (59%), however, opposed increasing costs of fast food marketed to children.