Category Archives: Newspapers

Blamed, shamed and at-risk: How have press representations of obesity responded to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Posted on by

There’s no question that all of us within society have been impacted in one way or another by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, it’s also the case that the health and wellbeing of certain groups have been particularly affected. A review of evidence on the disparities in the risks and outcomes of COVID-19 carried out by Public Health England suggests the virus has ‘replicated existing health inequalities and, in some cases, has increased them’. One group at particular risk of experiencing serious complications from COVID-19 is people living with obesity. Another report from Public Health England, reviewing evidence on the impact of excess weight on COVID-19, concluded that ‘the evidence consistently suggests that people with COVID-19 who are living with overweight or obesity, compared with those of a healthy weight, are at an increased risk of serious COVID-19 complications and death’.

In this paper, published in Critical Discourse Studies, Gavin Brookes explores how British print media representations of obesity have responded to the pandemic. The study, which is the latest in the CASS project exploring representations of obesity in the British press, is based on purpose-built corpora representing UK broadsheet and tabloid coverage of obesity during the pandemic. The analysis involved the use of keywords which were obtained by comparing each corpus against two reference corpora: one representing general press coverage of COVID-19 and the other representing general coverage of obesity in the six months leading up to the start of the pandemic. In this way, the study could account for keywords (and attendant discourses) that were characteristic of press representations of obesity during the pandemic relative not only to general coverage of obesity, but also general coverage of the virus.

Compared to this more general reportage, both broadsheet and tabloid reporting of obesity during the pandemic was found to be more fatalistic, with people with obesity being particularly likely to be construed as dying, or at least as being at heightened risk of dying, from the virus. For the broadsheets, this is a marked change in tone, with the pandemic seemingly ushering in a more pronounced focus on the connection between obesity and mortality. While such fatalistic discourses are characteristic of tabloid coverage of obesity in general, it seems that this way of framing obesity has gained even more prominence in these newspapers during the pandemic.

People with obesity were also depicted as a strain on an already-overburdened NHS, for example by taking up hospital beds and requiring oxygen therapy to the extent that this need creates a shortage for the rest of the population. The solution put forward (particularly by the tabloids, and to a lesser extent the right-leaning broadsheets) is for people with obesity to lose weight, for instance through exercise and supplements, in order to ‘save’ the NHS. This results in the responsibilisation of people with obesity, both for ensuring their own health and that of the wider public. This includes being responsible for ‘saving’ the NHS, though notably the damage endured by the NHS at the hand of austerity politics over the last decade is, conveniently, elided.

The link between obesity and coronavirus affords the press means by which it can maintain the newsworthiness of obesity in the context of what is, in COVID-19, a news story of global relevance. Meanwhile, the fatalistic and responsibilising depictions allow news agencies to key into the news value of negativity. Yet, discourses of personal responsibility are often criticised because they typically fail to grasp that obesity (along with other so-called ‘lifestyle’ conditions) is not simply the outcome of individual lifestyle choices, but likely results from a variety of factors (both individual and socio-political), over which individuals often have limited control. When the newspapers offer a public figure as privileged and powerful as Boris Johnson as a ‘role model’ for readers wanting to lose weight, they risk overlooking the influence of factors such as social privilege in the development of obesity.

When individuals and groups are blamed for problems in society, the result is the creation and propagation of stigma. The way much of the press has reported on obesity during the pandemic represents a ‘ramping up’ weight stigma, with people with obesity not only being blamed for their own health challenges but also shouldering responsibility for problems with the NHS against the backdrop of the most severe public health crisis of modern times. The weight stigma that results from this kind of blame-loading may engender further negative attitudes towards people with obesity, resulting in internalised shame. Yet the consequences of weight stigma may also be intensified by the circumstances surrounding the pandemic, which have already adversely affected the population’s mental health. Meanwhile, the aforementioned report by Public Health England stated that ‘stigma experienced by people living with obesity, may delay interaction with health care and may also contribute to increased risk of severe complications arising from COVID-19. It’s not all doom-and-gloom, though, as the pandemic also seems to have given rise to other, less stigmatising, changes to the press’s approach to obesity. For example, the broadsheets, and to a lesser extent the tabloids, also focussed more on race-related health disparities compared to in usual coverage of obesity. Meanwhile, the right-leaning tabloids offered otherwise uncharacteristic criticism of the UK Government, in particular for its ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme, which we presented as being hypocritical by encouraging people to eat out on the one hand while imploring them to lose weight on the other. From the perspective of promoting more balanced obesity coverage, which cuts across political allegiances, this could be viewed as an encouraging sign. However, it remains to be seen whether this, along with the other changes to press discourse ushered in by the pandemic, will be lasting or particular to this unique and unprecedented news context.

Representations of Obesity in the News: Project update and book announcement!

Posted on by

Gavin Brookes and Paul Baker

We are delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of a book based on research carried out as part of the CASS project, ‘Representations of Obesity in the News’. The book, titled Obesity in the News: Language and Representation in the Press, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. You can see a sneak preview of the cover here!

The book reports analysis of a 36 million-word corpus of all UK national newspaper articles mentioning obese or obesity published over a ten-year period (2008-2017). This analysis combines methods from Corpus Linguistics with Critical Discourse Studies to explore the discourses that characterise press coverage of obesity during this period. The book explores a wide range of themes in this large dataset, with chapters that answer the following questions:

• What discourses characterise representations of obesity in the press as a whole?

• How do obesity discourses differ according to newspapers’ formats and political leanings?

• How have obesity discourses changed over time, and how do they interact with the annual news cycle?

• How does the press use language to shame and stigmatise people with obesity, and how are attempts to ‘reclaim’ the notion of obesity depicted?

• What discourses surround the core concepts of the ‘healthy body’, ‘diet’ and ‘exercise’ in press coverage of obesity?

• How do obesity discourses interact with gender, and how does this influence the ways in which men and women with obesity are represented?

• How does the press talk about social class in relation to obesity, and how do such discourses contribute to differing depictions of obesity in people from different social class groups?

• Finally, how do audiences respond to press depictions of obesity in below-the-line comments on online articles?

The book will be the latest output from this project. You can read more about our work on changing representations of obesity over time in this recent Open Access article published in Social Science & Medicine. We are also working on articles which expand our analysis of obesity and social class, depictions of obesity risk, and obesity discourses in press coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, so keep your eyes peeled for further announcements!

Controlling the scale and pace of immigration: changes in UK press coverage about migration

Posted on by

The issue of immigration prominently featured in debates leading up to the June 2016 EU Referendum vote. It was argued that too many people were entering the UK, largely from other EU member states. Politicians and media also talked about ‘taking back control’—notably in the contexts of deciding who can enter Britain and enforcing borders. But, as our new Migration Observatory report ‘A Decade of Immigration in the British Press’ reveals through corpus linguistic methods, such language wasn’t necessarily new: in fact, under the coalition government from 2010-2015, the press was increasingly casting migration in terms of its scale or pace. And, the relative importance of ‘limiting’ or ‘controlling’ migration rose over this period, too.

Our report aimed to understand how British press coverage of immigration had changed in the decade leading up to the May 2015 General Election. We built upon previous research done at Lancaster University (headed by CASS Deputy Director Paul Baker) into portrayals of migrant groups. Our corpus of 171,401 items comes from all 19 national UK newspapers (including Sunday versions) that continuously published between January 2006 and May 2015. Using the Sketch Engine, we identified the kinds of modifiers (adjectives) and actions (verbs) associated with the terms ‘immigration’ and ‘migration’.

The modifiers that were most frequently associated with either of these terms included ‘mass’ (making up 15.7% of all modifiers appearing with either word), ‘net’ (15.6%), and ‘illegal’ (11.9%). Closer examination of the top 50 modifiers revealed a group of words related to the scale or pace of migration: in addition to ‘mass’ and ‘net’, these included terms such as ‘uncontrolled’, ‘large-scale’, ‘high’, and ‘unlimited’. Grouping these terms together, and tracking their proportion of all modifiers compared to those related to illegality—which is another prominent way of referring to immigrants—reveals how these terms made up an increasingly larger share of modifiers under both the Labour and coalition governments since 2006. Figure 1 shows how these words made up nearly 40% of all modifiers in 2006, but over 60% in the five months of 2015. Meanwhile, the share of modifiers referring to legal aspects of immigration (‘illegal’, ‘legal’, ‘unlawful’, or ‘irregular’) declined from 22% in 2006 to less than 10% in January-May 2015.

Figure 1.

blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another way of examining this dimension of ‘scale’ or ‘pace’ is to look at the kinds of actions (verbs) done to ‘immigration’ or ‘migration’. For example, in the sentences ‘the government is reducing migration’ and ‘we should encourage more highly-skilled immigration’, the verbs ‘reduce’ and ‘encourage’ signal some kind of action being done to ‘immigration’ and ‘migration’. In a similar way to Figure 1, we looked at the most frequent verbs associated with either term. A category of words expressing efforts to limit or control movement—what we call ‘limit’ verbs in the report—emerged from the top 50 verbs. These included examples such as ‘control’, ‘tackle’, ‘reduce’, and ‘cap’.

Figure 2 shows how the overall frequency of these limit verbs, indicated by the solid line, rose by about five times between 2006 and the high point in 2014—most notably from 2013. But, as a share of all verbs expressing some action towards ‘immigration’ or ‘migration’, this category was consistently making up 30-40% from 2010 onwards. This suggests that, although these kinds of words weren’t that frequent in absolute terms until 2014, the press had already started moving towards using them from 2010.

Figure 2.

blog1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These results show how the kind of language around immigration has changed since 2006. Corpus methods allow us to look at a large amount of text—in this case, over a significant period of time in British politics—in order to put recent rhetoric in its longer context. By doing so, researchers contribute concrete evidence about how the British press has actually talked about migrants and migration. Such evidence opens timely and important debates about the role of the press in public discussion (how does information presented through media impact public opinion?) and the extent to which press outputs should be scrutinised.

About the author: William Allen is a Research Officer with The Migration Observatory and the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), both based at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the ways that media, public opinion, and policymaking on migration interact. He also is interested in the ways that migration statistics and research evidence is used in non-academic settings, especially through data visualisations.