Obesity represents a major and growing global public health concern. The mass media play an important role inshaping public understandings of health, and obesity attracts much media coverage. This study offers the first contentanalysis of photographs illustrating UK newspaper articles about obesity. The researchers studied 119 articles and imagesfrom five major national newspapers. Researchers coded the manifest content of each image and article and used agraphical scale to estimate the body size of each image subject. Data were analysed with regard to the concepts of thenormalisation and stigmatisation of obesity. Articles’ descriptions of subjects’ body sizes were often found to differ fromcoders’ estimates, and subjects described as obese tended to represent the higher values of the obese BMI range, differingfrom the distribution of BMI values of obese adults in the UK. Researchers identified a tendency for image subjectsdescribed as overweight or obese to be depicted in stereotypical ways that could reinforce stigma. These findings areinterpreted as illustrations of how newspaper portrayals of obesity may contribute to societal normalisation and thestigmatisation of obesity, two forces that threaten to harm obese individuals and undermine public health efforts to reversetrends in obesity.
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