Abstract

This paper examines how the UK print media represents risk in reporting about obesity. Using corpus linguistics methods (keywords, collocations and consideration of concordance lines) combined with qualitative discourse analysis, references to risk were analysed in a 36-million-word corpus of articles from the national British press about obesity, published between 2008 and 2017. Two main analytical directions were followed: differences between newspapers (in terms of political affiliation and format) and change over time. Obesity was found to be both a risk factor for diseases like cancer but also itself the consequence of risk factors such as over-eating or not getting enough sleep. When talking about risk, tabloid newspapers tended to discuss the former type of risk, whereas broadsheets focussed on the latter. Left-leaning newspapers tended to focus on the role of powerful institutions, while right-leaning newspapers wrote more about risk in terms of individuals, either focussing on personal responsibility or the role of biological factors in determining an individual’s risk. References to risks relating to obesity increased both in terms of raw frequency and proportional frequency over the decade examined, with the largest increase occurring between 2016 and 2017. The year 2017 was characterised by more reference to scientific research and risks of health conditions that were referred to in dramatic terms (e.g. as a deadly risk), as well as containing more personalised language (e.g. more use of the second person pronoun your). The analysis indicates how notions of risk intersect with neoliberal principles of illness and self-management. In addition, readers receive different messages about risks relating to obesity depending on which newspapers they read, and there is evidence for an increasing reliance on a discourse of fear around obesity in the British national press overall.

摘要

本文探讨了英国印刷媒体如何代表报道肥胖的风险。使用语料库语言学方法（关键字、搭配和对一致性行的考虑）结合定性语篇分析，在 2008 年至 2017 年间发表的英国国家出版社关于肥胖的 3600 万字的文章语料库中分析了对风险的引用。两个主要分析方向是：报纸之间的差异（在政治派别和格式方面）和随时间的变化。肥胖既是癌症等疾病的危险因素，也是暴饮暴食或睡眠不足等危险因素的后果。在谈论风险时，小报倾向于讨论前一种风险，而大报则侧重于后者。左倾报纸倾向于关注强大机构的作用，而右倾报纸则更多地从个人角度来描述风​​险，要么关注个人责任，要么关注生物因素在确定个人风险中的作用。在审查的十年中，与肥胖相关的风险在原始频率和比例频率方面都有所增加，其中最大的增长发生在 2016 年至 2017 年之间。2017 年的特点是更多地参考了科学研究和所提及的健康状况风险以戏剧性的方式（例如，作为致命的风险），以及包含更多个性化的语言（例如更多地使用第二人称代词your）。分析表明风险概念如何与疾病和自我管理的新自由主义原则相交。此外，根据阅读的报纸，读者收到的关于肥胖风险的信息也不同，有证据表明，英国国家媒体总体上越来越依赖关于肥胖的恐惧言论。