Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
Obes Rev. 2012 Jun;13(6):554-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-789X.2012.00985.x. Epub 2012 Feb 17.
Obesity attracts large volumes of news coverage. This in turn has spawned academic studies investigating how news framing may affect views about causes of and solutions to obesity. We use key studies to demonstrate that although existing research has made valuable discoveries about how obesity is defined in various media outlets, some methodological and theoretical questions remain unaddressed. We argue that extant research has focused on one dimension of analysis--the problematization of obesity in news stories--precluding insights into the entire process of obesity communication. Drawing on framing and media studies research, we propose a multidimensional approach to shed more light on factors affecting the production of obesity news stories by journalists and how they may be received by audience members. Ways of moving research into this multidimensional direction are proposed, including analysis of journalistic news values, political leaning and style of media outlets, emotion-eliciting language, readers' comments and obesity-related news visuals. Knowledge resulting from the exploration of these dimensions of the issue of obesity can be used to improve strategies to inform and engage audience members.
肥胖问题吸引了大量新闻报道。这反过来又催生了学术研究，探讨新闻报道的框架如何影响人们对肥胖原因和解决方案的看法。我们使用主要研究来证明，尽管现有研究已经对各种媒体机构如何定义肥胖做出了有价值的发现，但一些方法和理论问题仍未得到解决。我们认为，现有研究只关注分析的一个维度——新闻故事中肥胖问题的提出，从而排除了对肥胖传播整个过程的深入了解。借鉴框架和媒体研究的研究成果，我们提出了一种多维方法，以更深入地了解影响记者撰写肥胖新闻故事的因素，以及受众对这些故事的接受方式。我们提出了将研究推向多维方向的方法，包括分析新闻价值、媒体机构的政治倾向和风格、引起情感的语言、读者评论和与肥胖相关的新闻图片。通过探索肥胖问题的这些方面，可以获得相关知识，从而改进告知和吸引受众的策略。
