UCLA.
Soc Probl. 2010;57(4):586-610. doi: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.4.586.
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.
本文借鉴了对美国和法国关于“超重”和“肥胖”新闻报道的分析，考察了国家背景（包括在全球民族国家领域中的地位，以及不同的国家政治和文化）如何塑造社会问题的框架。正如之前的研究所示，来自法国（这两个国家中经济上占主导地位但文化上占主导地位的国家）的新闻报道比来自美国的报道更频繁地提到美国，而且通常是负面的。我们的贡献是强调反美言论的灵活性，这种言论为各种社会问题框架提供了有力的论据。具体来说，根据精英利益，法国的新闻报道可能会援引反美言论来拒绝将某种现象视为真正的公共问题，也可能会利用这种言论来引起人们对某个问题的关注。我们进一步展示了不同的文化因素如何影响新闻报道。尽管早期的研究表明，基于群体的歧视框架在美国比在法国更为常见，但我们发现，美国的新闻样本并不比法国的新闻样本更有可能讨论基于体重的歧视。我们将这归因于这种特定框架的一些具体障碍，即普遍认为体型是一种行为，类似于吸烟，而不是像种族那样的固有特征。这一讨论更广泛地指出了一些限制框架在社会问题之间传播的机制。
