Changing frames of obesity in the UK press 2008–2017

‘Lose weight, save the NHS’: Discourses of obesity in press coverage of COVID-19

“…For the broadsheets in particular, obesity, like COVID-19, could be constructed as the result of race-related social disparities. Social explanations have been found to be most characteristic of the left-leaning broadsheets in general coverage of obesity (Baker et al, 2020), though the representation of race-related health inequalities as causing obesity has not been noted in previous studies of the British press. We could thus infer that for the broadsheets, and particularly those on the left of the political spectrum, the pandemic has at least provided an opportunity to report more, and more critically, on the role of race-related health inequalities in contributing to obesity and other health problems.…”

“…Obesity has been a prominent topic in UK news coverage of the pandemic. Outside of the pandemic context, news representations of obesity have been widely studied (see Atanasova et al, 2012), with the most recent studies carried out as part of a wider programme of research within which the present article is situated (see: Baker at al., 2020;Brookes & Baker, 2021a, p. 2021b. This project takes a corpus-based approach to critically analysing the discourses in a 36-million-word (approx.)…”

Crime or culture? Representations of chemsex in the British press and magazines aimed at GBTQ+ men

“…A commonality running through research into health(care) communication is that the press are able to normalise attitudes towards people with certain health conditions. The press also tend to focus on the negative elements of health conditions, such as poor behaviours from those suffering with mental health conditions, or the cost of healthcare to the taxpayer (see Baker et al, 2020;Balfour, 2019;Brookes et al, 2018). Baker et al (2020) carried out a diachronic analysis on a 35-million-word corpus of newspaper articles about obesity from 2008 to 2017.…”

“…The press also tend to focus on the negative elements of health conditions, such as poor behaviours from those suffering with mental health conditions, or the cost of healthcare to the taxpayer (see Baker et al, 2020;Balfour, 2019;Brookes et al, 2018). Baker et al (2020) carried out a diachronic analysis on a 35-million-word corpus of newspaper articles about obesity from 2008 to 2017. They argued that over time obesity was increasingly represented as the responsibility of the individual, while the focus on the role of social factors contributing to obesity (such as government policy) decreased.…”

“…We argue for the use of corpus linguistics (see Baker et al, 2020), an approach that uses computer software to examine patterns in language. Following this, we outline our two corpora of news articles, describing how they were gathered and analysed.…”