Obesity in the News: Language and Representation in the Press

Description

Obesity is a pressing social issue and a persistently newsworthy topic for the media. This book examines the linguistic representation of obesity in the British press. It combines techniques from corpus linguistics with critical discourse studies to analyse a large corpus of newspaper articles (36 million words) representing ten years of obesity coverage. These articles are studied from a range of methodological perspectives, and analytical themes include variation between newspapers, change over time, diet and exercise, gender and social class. The volume also investigates the language that readers use when responding to obesity representations in the context of online comments. The authors reveal the power of linguistic choices to shame and stigmatise people with obesity, presenting them as irresponsible and morally deviant. Yet the analysis also demonstrates the potential for alternative representations which place greater focus on the role that social and political forces play in this topical health issue.

Gavin Brookes is a Senior Research Associate in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University. His research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse studies, health communication and multimodality. He is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. He has written twenty books on various aspects of language, discourse and corpus linguistics. He is commissioning editor of the journal Corpora, an associate editor of the Cambridge Elements in Corpus Linguistics series and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.