scholarly journals ‘You Owe It to Yourself, Everyone You Love and to Our Beleaguered NHS to Get Yourself Fit and Well’: Weight Stigma in the British Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic—A Thematic Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 478
Author(s):  
Camila Carbone-Moane ◽  
Andrew Guise

The portrayal of obesity in the media can impact public health by guiding peoples’ behaviours and furthering stigma. Individual responsibility for body weight along with negative portrayals of obesity have frequently dominated UK media discourses on obesity. This study aims to explore how the media has represented obesity during the COVID-19 pandemic through a thematic analysis of 95 UK online newspaper articles published in The Sun, The Mail Online, and The Guardian. The first theme, lifestyle recommendations, accounts for media coverage providing ‘expert’ advice on losing weight. The second theme, individual responsibility, emphasises media appeals to self-governance to tackle obesity and protect the NHS during the pandemic. The third theme, actors of change, explores how celebrities and politicians are presented as examples of weight management. These results suggest that individuals are held responsible for their weight and accountable for protecting the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stigma can be furthered by the decontextualisation of lifestyle recommendations and exacerbated by the actors of change presented: Celebrity profiles reveal gendered goals for weight management, and politicians exemplify self-governance, which consolidates their power. In conclusion, individualising and stigmatising discourses around obesity have taken new forms during the pandemic that link health responsibility to protecting the NHS and invokes celebrities and politicians to foster action.

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gertrud Pfister ◽  
Rikke Schou Jeppesen

Artiklen beskriver og forklarer de forandringer, som sporten har gennemgået, og den indflydelse, som disse forandringer har haft på udøvere og på deres kroppe og images. Der er særlig fokus på mediernes rolle i forhandlingen om konstruktion af ambivalente maskulinitetsformer. Gertrud Pfister & Rikke Schou Jeppesen: Images, Bodies and Masculinities. Media discourses about Ski JumpersToday ski jumping can be considered a typical media sport: it has very few participants and no basis to become a »sport for all« movement. Nevertheless, the few specialists and their main events attract masses of spectators and great media attention. The high demands of skill and strength as well as the danger involved have made ski jumping a typical male sport. Since its beginnings in the 19th century a ski jumper was looked upon as the epitome of »true manhood«. Today ski jumpers are celebrities with fragile egos, skinny bodies, boyish looks, ambivalent masculinities and fan communities of teenage girls. With a constructivist theoretical approach, we will describe and explain the changes that have taken place in ski jumping and the effects of these changes on the athletes, their bodies, their images and their masculinities. The focus will be on the media representation of two German ski jumpers, Martin Schmitt and Sven Hannawald who dominated this sport between 2000 and 2003. Sources are the articles about these athletes in 6 German print media. With a qualitative content analysis, we explore the media coverage of ski jumping and the way the athletes are presented. The correlations between the images and the »doing gender« of the athletes and their presentations in the media along with the role of the media in constructing new and ambivalent masculinities will be the key issues of this article.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Stjernborg ◽  
Mekonnen Tesfahuney ◽  
Anders Wretstrand

This study focuses on Seved, a segregated and socioeconomically “poor” neighborhood in the city of Malmö in Sweden. It has attracted wide media coverage, a possible consequence of which is its increased stigmatization. The wide disparity between perceived or imagined fear and the actual incidence of, or exposure to, violence attests to the important role of the media in shaping mental maps and place images. Critical discourse analysis of daily newspaper articles shows that Seved is predominantly construed as unruly and a place of lawlessness. Mobility comprises an important aspect of the stigmatization of places, the politics of fear, and discourses of the “other.” In turn, place stigmatization, discourses of the other, and the politics of fear directly and indirectly affect mobility strategies of individuals and groups.


Author(s):  
Michelle J. Lee

AbstractIn 2017, the long-festering discriminatory treatment to the Rohingyas in Myanmar, both in law and practice, resulted in the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in Asia. During the 2016‑2017 Rohingya refugee crisis, the aerial shots of burnt villages and images of people trudging toward the horizon in search of refuge in neighboring nations dominated the Western media. However, for humanitarians, the question of whether the media helps with humanitarian crises remains complicated and unclear. This study examines the effects of media coverage on the Rohingya refugee crisis based on articles from two liberal, elite newspaper sources, The New York Times and The Guardian between 2010 and 2020. The study reveals that the attempts of international pressure to stop the crisis have increased through media coverage and political pressures; however, the number of Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar intensified due to worsening violence and human rights violations committed by the Myanmar army. Findings are discussed using the lens of cultural and ideological context. The study suggests that in Myanmar, where authoritarian military culture is pervasive, there is a limited influence of the international press on the state-sponsored ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population and questions whether consistent international pressure could have changed the outcome.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 192-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekwutosi Sanita Nwakpu ◽  
Valentine Okwudilichukwu Ezema ◽  
Jude Nwakpoke Ogbodo

Background: Part of the role of the media is to report any issue affecting the society to the masses. Coronavirus has become an issue of transnational concern. The importance of the media in the coverage of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Nigeria and its implications among Nigerian populace cannot be overestimated. This study evaluates how Nigerian media depict the coronavirus pandemic and how the depictions shape people’s perception and response to the pandemic. Methods: The study employed a quantitative design (newspaper content analysis and questionnaire). The content analysis examines the nature of media coverage of coronavirus in Nigeria and China using four major national newspapers (The Sun, The Vanguard, The Guardian and The Punch). The period of study ranged from January 2020 to March 2020. A total of 1070newspaper items on coronavirus outbreak were identified across the four newspapers and content-analysed. Results: The finding shows that the coverage of the pandemic was dominated by straight news reports accounting for 763 or (71.3%) of all analysed items. This was followed by opinions 169(15.8%), features 120 (11.2%) and editorials 18 (1.7%) respectively. The Punch 309 (28.9%)reported the outbreak more frequently than The Sun 266 (24.9%), The Guardian 258 (24.1%), and Vanguard 237 (22.1%). Finding further suggests that the framing pattern adopted by the newspapers helped Nigerians to take precautionary measures. Conclusion: Continuous reportage of COVID-19 has proved effective in creating awareness about safety and preventive measures thereby helping to ‘flatten the curve’ and contain the spread of the virus. However, the newspapers should avoid creating fear/panic in reporting the pandemic.


2020 ◽  
pp. 205943642098007
Author(s):  
Xiaoling Zhang ◽  
Gareth Shaw

This article addresses one question: how is the coronavirus outbreak and its management in China reported in the UK media in general, and on the Internet in particular? It does so by examining how the online versions of the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mail reported on the coronavirus outbreak in China, but more importantly, on how China handled it, over a 20-week timeframe. The sentiment analysis and thematic analysis show that although the selected media are of different types in the United Kingdom, the themes and topics are not substantially different from each other. This implies that the general media-consuming public in the United Kingdom would regard China’s handling of the virus as largely negative or neutral. However, the ways of discussing and presenting those topics were subject to variation between the publications, which in turn is reflected in the attitudes and perceptions of their readers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104973232110148
Author(s):  
Niklas Petersen ◽  
Silke Schicktanz

In the absence of effective pharmacological therapy options, the focus of dementia and Alzheimer’s research has shifted from treatment and care to risk prediction, early detection, and prevention. Public health communication and media coverage regarding dementia emphasize the individual responsibility for dementia risk management. Focusing on the social and moral implications of the new understanding and public representation of dementia, we present an analysis of medical science, nursing science, and media discourses in Germany between 2014 and 2019. We show which notions of dementia and prevention characterize the medical and nursing science debates regarding dementia and how scientific knowledge is transferred into media discourses on dementia. We further discuss how dementia risk communication interacts with contemporary social and health policies and in what ways current dementia discourses are associated with a (self-)responsibilization of cognitive aging.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-161
Author(s):  
Natalija Mažeikienė ◽  
Judita Kasperiūnienė ◽  
Ilona Tandzegolskienė

This article refers to the concept of nuclearity as a broader technopolitical phenomenon that implies a political and cultural configuration of technical and scientific matters. The nuclear media discourses become a site of tensions, struggles, and power relations between various institutions, social groups, and agents who seek to frame nuclear issues. The Bourdieusian concept of a field as a domain of social interaction is employed by the authors of this article seeking to reveal interactions and power configurations within and between several fields: journalism and media, economy, politics, and cultural production fields (cinematography, literature, and art). Commercial and political pressures on media raise a question about the autonomy of this field. Media coverage of nuclear issues in Lithuania during the period 2018–2020, includes media framing produced by different sponsors of the nuclear media discourses and agents from the above-mentioned fields of journalism, nuclear industry, politics, cinematography or arts. The media coverage includes the news and press releases produced within PR and public communication of the atomic energy industry by representing the decommissioning of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, articles written by journalists about the atomic city Visaginas, and challenges faced by the local community due to the closure of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant. The nuclear discourse includes debates by politicians around the topic of the lack of safety of the construction of the Astravyets Nuclear Power Plant in Belarus, and media coverage of the HBO series <em>Chernobyl</em> representing a strong antinuclear narrative by portraying the Chernobyl disaster crisis and expressing strong criticism of communism. The authors of this article carried out a qualitative content analysis of media coverage on nuclear issues and revealed features of the discourse: interpretative packages, frames, framing devices (Gamson &amp; Modigliani, 1989), and dominating actors and institutions supporting the discourse.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-360
Author(s):  
Natalija Mažeikienė ◽  
Judita Kasperiūnienė ◽  
Ilona Tandzegolskienė

The article presents a critical discourse analysis of media coverage of the most important Lithuanian strategic object — the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant INPP — in the three biggest news portals. Media news focuses mostly on certain aspects of decommissioning of the INPP management issues and the transparency of financing mechanisms. Environmental and social aspects of the decommissioning are not sufficiently disclosed and discussed. The community of Visaginas the satellite town for the workers of the INPP remains an invisible and silent actor of the discourse. In the media news portals, the town is portrayed as disconnected from the INPP. This divide could be explained by assuming that after the closure of the INPP as a major feeding enterprise the town must search for a re-definition of its identity and construct this identity without nuclear energy and without the INPP. On the other hand, such a divide reflects a common trend characteristic of the entire nuclear discourse — to disempower communities and the public, create a boundary between the industry and the public, between the experts and ordinary citizens.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Whigham ◽  
Jack Black

This article critically examines print media discourses regarding the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games. The forthcoming analysis examines the political symbolism of the Commonwealth Games with regard to the interlinkages between the British Empire, sport and the global political status of the United Kingdom. The article gives specific consideration to the United Kingdom’s declining global power as well as the interconnections between the 2014 Games and the Scottish independence referendum. Hechter’s ‘internal colonialism’ thesis, which portrays Scotland’s marginalised status within the United Kingdom, is drawn upon to critically explore the political symbolism of sport for Scottish nationalism. Discussion then focuses upon the extent to which the modern Commonwealth is symptomatic of the United Kingdom’s declining status as a global power. Finally, the existence of these narrative tropes in print media coverage of the Commonwealth Games is examined, allowing for critical reflections on the continuing interconnections between the media, sport, nationalism and post-imperial global politics.


Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Nakkerud

AbstractOver the past decade, the choice of living childfree has increasingly been viewed as a pro-environmental behaviour. Recent research has investigated statistical relations between environmental concern and reproductive attitudes, as well as exploring the processes around actually deciding to live environmentally childfree. Based on increased public attention about the phenomenon, this article employs Michael Billig’s notion of ideological dilemmas to analyse the media coverage of choosing to live environmentally childfree, attempting to answer how these dilemmas influence whether living childfree is perceived as a relevant pro-environmental behaviour. Thirty-one news items were analysed using a synthesis of critical discursive psychology and thematic analysis. The analysis identified five ideological concepts: liberalism, sustainable development, globalism, biologism and humanism. Each of these concepts contains positions supporting and opposing the idea of living environmentally childfree in Norway. These ideological dilemmas seem to weaken the perceived relevance of living environmentally childfree, as the topic is easily dismissed or framed as irrelevant. I therefore conclude that the discourse of living environmentally childfree is analogous to how society generally relates to solutions to the environmental crises.


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