Social Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on "Overweight" and "Obesity" in the United States and France

• Published in: Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2010-11, Vol.57 (4), p.586-610
• Main Authors: Saguy, Abigail C., Gruys, Kjerstin, Gong, Shanna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anti-Americanism; Body mass index; Body size; Cross cultural studies; Cultural Diversity; Epidemics; Food; France - ethnology; Hegemony; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; Immigration; Journalism; Mass Media - history; Media coverage; News media; Obesity; Obesity - ethnology; Obesity - history; Overweight; Overweight - ethnology; Overweight - history; Political behaviour; Political sociology; Public Health - economics; Public Health - education; Public Health - history; Public Opinion - history; Rhetoric; Sexual harassment; Social issues; Social Problems - ethnology; Social Problems - history; Social Problems - psychology; Social problems and social policy. Social work; Social research; Sociology; Sociology of health and medicine; Statistical significance; United States - ethnology; Weight based discrimination; Weight control
• ISSN: 0037-7791; 1533-8533
• 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 theflexibilityof 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 torejecta given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric todrum upconcern 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 isnomore 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.