The Power of the Media in Health Communication

Valentina Marinescu, Bianca Mitu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317019503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Policy

Health is a contested concept that has been defined in numerous ways. The media is extremely powerful in promoting health beliefs and in creating role models for contemporary people. The ways in which health is defined or understood can have wide-ranging implications and can have an impact on issues such as health promotion or health literacy. Health presentation in the media has a significant social impact because this type of message is important in changing people's beliefs, attitudes and behaviours relating to health and in promoting health-related knowledge among the target audience. The present volume provides an interdisciplinary and multicultural contemporary approach to the controversial link between medicine and media. The authors that have contributed to this volume analyse the media and medicine from different perspectives and different countries (USA, UK, Portugal, Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico, Estonia, Romania), thus offering a re-positioning of the study of media and medicine. The new perspectives offered by this volume will be of interest to any health communication or media studies student or academic since they bring to light new ideas, new methodologies and new results.

Part IRepresentations of health and illness in mass media

1Depressing news

Obesity panic, reflexive embodiment and teen mental health in the USA

Stephen Kline

DOI: 10.4324/9781315554068-4

Introduction

Moral panic and risk agenda setting

From an historical perspective, the overweight body lies at the heart of intersecting cultural discourses on greed, sexuality, race, aesthetics and class. But as Azzarito (2007) has argued, since the 1950s the meanings associated with ‘fat’ bodies were increasingly defined by the body mass index (BMI is defined by the ratio between height and weight) which enabled health professionals to statistically identify a normal body morphology (BMI > 18.5 and < 25) and distinguish it from the ‘adipose’– as part of a broader trend to a medicalization of embodiment (Lupton 1996). The gathering of BMI data over the last half century has also enabled epidemiologists to link overweight (BMI > 25) and obese (BMI > 30) weight classes to risk factors associated with cardio-vascular diseases (CVD), diabetes and cancer (NIH 2013). With obesity rising from 12 per cent of the adult population in 1978 to about 30 per cent in 2000, public health officials at the US Centers for Disease Control (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2013) declared that obesity had become an epidemic (Flegal et al. 2013). With similar evidence of population weight gain around the world, in 1997 the World Health Organization (WHO 1997) launched a major public health initiative targeting the growing threat of the ‘obesity epidemic’ in the developed nations.

Studying the active role that official medical sources play in setting the health risk agenda, Roy et al. (2007) comment on the ‘socially constructed nature of news health messages’ about obesity. Assessing the dynamics underwriting press coverage of obesity, they found that journalists responded to published research documents promoted by medical advocates. These authors go on to note that health advocates increasingly used PR approaches, which assimilate knowledge of news values into the initiatives of garnering coverage, particularly the ‘sensationalist’ perspective on risk. Most of the obesity stories emphasized the health risks and rising costs associated with weight gain (69.7 per cent), 30 per cent included mention of incidence data and population health issues (epidemiology), while 25 per cent mentioned the risk factors (causes) associated with obesity. Using these public relations techniques, public health officials became more effective in drawing media attention to the ‘fattening’ of the TV generation who reached adulthood in the late 1970s and began having bariatric and triple bi-pass surgery in the late 1990s. In this light, Roy et al. (2007) claim that news values like novelty, celebrity, controversy, locality, human interest, community relevance and timeliness factor into the journalists’ framing of stories, helped to spin the globesity epidemic into a leading science story.

This new health risk quickly found its way onto the world's news agenda. A Media Tenor (2006) study of health journalism confirmed the rise of obesity in the global health agenda noting how in 2004 it edged out cancer and alcoholism, falling close behind other epidemics like Avian Flu and HIV in the global surveillance of health issues. Kline (2004) has used Stanley Cohen's (1972) theory of ‘moral panic’ in his frame analysis of the British press coverage of the health issues presented by population weight gain as it grew from occasional discussion of ‘fat camps and anorexic models in 2000 to an almost daily litany of dangers caused by children's fast food diet in 2004’ (Kline 2011). Like other commentaries on moral panic (Thompson 1998; Barker and Petley 1997), Kline (2004) notes how the journalists’ choice of sources confirms the growing role of health researchers and advocates who amplify the rhetoric of ‘danger’ and ‘blame’ surrounding the risk. In the UK, a coalition of health, food and children's advocates combined forces to publish reports, lobby politicians and alert the public about the health risks associated with weight gain generally, and children's weight gain particularly. Kline's analysis also notes how journalistic emphasis on the links between weight gain and children's health is pivotal in the framing of blame and mitigation (Kline 2011). Blaming ‘big food’ for exploiting vulnerable children, journalists gave voice to their repeated calls for bans on fast food marketing to children, which became law in the UK in 2007.

Lawrence (2004) reports a frame analysis of obesity stories in the US media to document the marked increase in news coverage of the health consequences of weight gain from the beginning of the new millennium which grew dramatically in 2002 and 2003. Based on this content analysis, Lawrence (2004) notes how the news agenda-setting process is galvanized by events such as fast food law suits, the film Supersize Me or the World Health Organization's report highlighting the long term threats to children from soft drinks (WHO 2003). Lawrence (2004) also notes that many of these stories articulated what she calls the ‘junk food frame’ that attributed blame for increasing child obesity to food industries. In her mind, this news analysis underlines the

vigorous frame contest … which opposed the arguments emphasizing personal responsibility for health with arguments emphasizing the social environment, including corporate and public policy.

(Lawrence 2004, p. 56)

Noting that in 2003 stories about restaurant eating and fast food marketing accounted for one-third of all attributions of blame for child obesity, she concludes that ‘this question of whether the body politic bears some responsibility for the shape of individual American bodies’ became the driving force behind this public health debate (Lawrence 2004, p. 57).

Kim and Willis (2007) also found that front-page coverage of obesity increased slowly from 157 stories in 1995 to 225 in 1997, peaking in 2003 at 664 unique stories, but falling back to 320 in 2004. Coverage on television mirrored that in the quality newspapers. Their work also studied the journalistic framing of responsibility for the causes and solutions to this new health crisis, particularly the way in which concerns about child obesity was instrumental in framing obesity as a public health problem intensified by food advertising in the media. They conclude that obesity struck such a deep chord of anxiety in America because the ideology of individualism puts the responsibility for health on the individual, not the government. Amid the growing political controversy, the press gave space to health advocates who blamed the food industry for the food choices of children, yet remained sceptical about the ability of the state to reduce the burden of illness caused by children's food choices. Here lies a major paradox when it comes to blame for the risks associated with child obesity and the possible ways of mitigating them. Although the individual is ultimately held to be responsible for their own health, it is parents and schools that are responsible for children's up-bringing (Kline 2010).

Figure 1.1 Increasing reporting of obesity in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Globe and Mail, 1998–2007

In Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyle, Kline (2011) reports a detailed discourse analysis of news coverage of obesity in the English language quality press comparing the coverage in the UK, USA and Canada between 1997 and 2007 (Kline 2011). Figure 1.1 clearly documents the agenda setting role of public health organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention whose reports set the stage for a dramatic increase in journalistic coverage of the health risks associated with population weight gain, particularly among those defined as clinically obese. Stories about the obesity epidemic exhibit a fivefold rise from a yearly average of 30 in 1998, to 167 in 2004 in each paper. Most of these stories used the word ‘epidemic’ and mention the health risks associated with both overweight and obese weight classifications, as well as the financial burden placed upon health care by those who suffered from this disease. Projecting the trends in BMI into the future, journalists predicted an escalating burden of illness caused by children's population weight gain.

But the moral panic framing amplified this coverage as journalists followed the story, particularly after the release of Supersize Me and a WHO report linking children's weight gain to diet and nutrition (WHO 2003). The overweight bodies of children were taken as a sign of a growing malady associated with affluent lifestyles. By 2003, mention of fast food and sugary drinks in the press exceeded references to smoking and cancer. By 2005, more than half the stories about obesity in the quality pres...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: emerging trends in media and health research
• Part I Representations of health and illness in mass media
• Part II Mediations of doctor–patient communication
• Part III Journalists’ discourses about health
• Part IV Internet and health
• Conclusion: Media and health – Where do we go from here?
• Index