| Social problem construction and national context: news reporting on "overweight" and "obesity" in the United States and France. | |
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MedLine Citation:
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PMID: 20976972 Owner: HMD Status: MEDLINE |
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
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Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems. |
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Authors:
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Abigail C Saguy; Kjerstin Gruys; Shanna Gong |
Publication Detail:
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Type: Historical Article; Journal Article |
Journal Detail:
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Title: Social problems Volume: 57 ISSN: 0037-7791 ISO Abbreviation: Soc Probl Publication Date: 2010 |
Date Detail:
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Created Date: 2010-10-26 Completed Date: 2010-12-30 Revised Date: - |
Medline Journal Info:
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Nlm Unique ID: 20810170R Medline TA: Soc Probl Country: United States |
Other Details:
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Languages: eng Pagination: 586-610 Citation Subset: Q |
Affiliation:
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UCLA. |
Export Citation:
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APA/MLA Format Download EndNote Download BibTex |
| MeSH Terms | |
Descriptor/Qualifier:
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Cultural Diversity* France / ethnology History, 20th Century History, 21st Century Mass Media* / history Obesity* / ethnology, history Overweight* / ethnology, history Public Health / economics, education, history Public Opinion / history Social Problems* / ethnology, history, psychology United States / ethnology |
From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine
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