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Fat Panic! The “Obesity Epidemic” as Moral Panic |
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Abstract:
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Examining the volume and content of media reporting on obesity, we evaluate whether the “obesity epidemic” can be constructively analyzed as a “moral panic,” in which the obese are treated as “folk devils” who violate societal values of self-control (Cohen 1972). Drawing on content analysis of 212 media articles, we find that media coverage of obesity does indeed have many of the characteristics of a moral panic. Public attention to this issue has ballooned in a way that is disproportionate to increased rates of obesity and treatment of related problems like smoking, hunger/malnutrition, and eating disorders. The media has dramatized and stylized the issue by reporting most heavily on scientific studies with dramatic findings, employing alarming metaphors, citing laundry lists of health risks associated with obesity, and sidestepping scientific debates about whether obesity is as much of a problem as some maintain. The media has treated obesity as a moral issue by focusing on individual more than structural obesity causes and solutions, especially when discussing African-Americans, Latinos, or the poor, suggesting that the issue of obesity has the potential to deepen inequality based on race, ethnicity, and class, as it simultaneously reinforces prejudice based on body size. We identify several factors that are associated with increased reporting on obesity, including increased consumption, increased publication of medical research on obesity, marketing of weight-loss drugs, and the number of weight-loss surgeries performed, lending some evidence for grassroots, elite-engineered, and interest-groups theories of moral panics. |
Most Common Document Word Stems:
obes (255), articl (110), media (93), discuss (88), weight (87), report (77), percent (68), loss (67), 1 (59), moral (56), panic (53), fat (52), food (49), hypothesi (46), health (46), like (41), mention (40), increas (39), time (36), public (36), drug (33), |
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Moral panic, social problem, obesity, morality, social inequality, mass media |
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Association:
Name: American Sociological Association
URL: http://www.asanet.org
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Citation:
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MLA Citation:
| Saguy, Abigail. and Almeling, Rene. "Fat Panic! The “Obesity Epidemic” as Moral Panic" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, Aug 12, 2005 <Not Available>. 2008-10-23 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p22928_index.html> |
APA Citation:
| Saguy, A. C. and Almeling, R. , 2005-08-12 "Fat Panic! The “Obesity Epidemic” as Moral Panic" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Philadelphia, PA Online <APPLICATION/PDF>. 2008-10-23 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p22928_index.html |
Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Examining the volume and content of media reporting on obesity, we evaluate whether the “obesity epidemic” can be constructively analyzed as a “moral panic,” in which the obese are treated as “folk devils” who violate societal values of self-control (Cohen 1972). Drawing on content analysis of 212 media articles, we find that media coverage of obesity does indeed have many of the characteristics of a moral panic. Public attention to this issue has ballooned in a way that is disproportionate to increased rates of obesity and treatment of related problems like smoking, hunger/malnutrition, and eating disorders. The media has dramatized and stylized the issue by reporting most heavily on scientific studies with dramatic findings, employing alarming metaphors, citing laundry lists of health risks associated with obesity, and sidestepping scientific debates about whether obesity is as much of a problem as some maintain. The media has treated obesity as a moral issue by focusing on individual more than structural obesity causes and solutions, especially when discussing African-Americans, Latinos, or the poor, suggesting that the issue of obesity has the potential to deepen inequality based on race, ethnicity, and class, as it simultaneously reinforces prejudice based on body size. We identify several factors that are associated with increased reporting on obesity, including increased consumption, increased publication of medical research on obesity, marketing of weight-loss drugs, and the number of weight-loss surgeries performed, lending some evidence for grassroots, elite-engineered, and interest-groups theories of moral panics. |
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| Fat Panic! The “Obesity Epidemic” as Moral Panic * ** Abigail C. Saguy Rene Almeling * Assistant Professor UCLA Department of Sociology. This research is part of a larger project that has been funded by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Program in Health Policy Research the Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (run jointly by American Sociological Association and the National Science Foundation) the UCLA Sociology Department three UCLA Senate Grants and by the |
| we have too few foreign articles to sustain a logistic regression so this discussion is only suggestive. 12 It might be that consumer spending is not the best measure of consumption in Stearns’ theory. Future drafts of this paper will examine other measures of consumer spending break spending down by quintile of earners and examining a larger time period. Like Stearns Robert Frank (1999) argues that the 1990s were a period of heightened consumption especially of luxury goods. If |
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