Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American "Obesity Epidemic”

Chapter 2. All the News That's Fat to Print: The American Obesity Epidemic and the Media

40 Almost daily, newspaper headlines explore new facets of the obesity epidemic. New diet books and programs are promoted on the morning news and dramatic stories of surgical weight loss are staples of the talk-show scene. Popular magazines and websites span topics from entertainment to parenting feature stories about obesity, childhood obesity, and weight loss. The health-care reform debate is reduced to sound bites about obesity’s being key to cost-cutting measures and to the funding of various reforms. More debate over President Barack Obama’s nomination of Dr. Regina Benjamin for surgeon general centered around her girth than her qualifications for the position. Shows like Honey, We’re Killing the Kids, The Biggest Loser, and Celebrity Fit Club have become mainstays of reality television. Discussions about more supposedly size-positive shows like Drop Dead Diva and More to Love include expressions of fears that anything that accepts larger people as normal will encourage further increases in weight and spread the obesity epidemic. The media attention given to obesity is unprecedented, constant, and central to the construction of obesity as one of the greatest social problems facing the United States and the world in the twenty-first century. As we’ve seen in the last chapter, moral entrepreneurs are a necessary but insufficient piece of the rise of the obesity epidemic. The spread of postmodern epidemics as moral panics also depends on agents to disseminate the claims of these entrepreneurs. As scholars of moral panics have pointed out, the main avenue for this is the media, and the case of obesity 2 All the News That’s Fat to Print The American Obesity Epidemic and the Media ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FAT TO PRINT 41 is no exception (Cohen 1972; LeBesco 2010). The media, in all their various forms, are at the center of the obesity epidemic. This chapter examines the role of the media in the obesity epidemic. I do this through a close analysis of articles published on obesity in the New York Times, the “paper of record” in the United States. The Times has been at the forefront of reporting on obesity, weight, and health since the early 1990s.1 Between 1990 and 2001 the Times published 751 articles on obesity. In comparison, during the same period, the Times published 544 articles on smoking, 672 articles on the AIDS epidemic, and 531 articles on pollution.2 In the broadest sense, these 751 articles are about obesity, fatness , and body size, yet these themes arise in a range of contexts. The sheer volume of media attention to obesity points to the fact that the obesity epidemic is not just a concern or product of discussions among policy makers and government officials. Indeed, this media dissemination of the scientific facts about weight and health reflects and reproduces what has become our larger commonsense knowledge about weight. The amount of coverage itself is also part and parcel of the way the media spread moral panics and create a sense of urgency around various social problems. Many have analyzed how media overreporting on phenomena such as violent crime, child abduction, teenage pregnancy, and road rage has created a “culture of fear” and, in turn, contributes to everincreasing media coverage of these issues to the effect that problems like poverty go underreported (Cohen 1972; Glassner 2000). Obesity is no exception and is perhaps the best example of the tenacity of this type of overreporting as the supposed epidemic nears the twenty-year mark with no abatement in coverage in sight. The fear and panic characteristic of postmodern epidemics is reflected in the Times reporting on obesity since the early 1990s. In 1994, for example, the Times reported one researcher as saying, “We’re frightened right now because obesity is an epidemic that has made all of us wake up” (Burros 1994b). The media, including the Times, present the obesity epidemic as a scientific fact. While a small percentage of the Times reporting on obesity does question some of the claims made about the link between weight and health, nowhere does the Times question the existence of the epidemic. The obesity epidemic has been portrayed by most media as a scientific reality. Even mainstream reports that question some received knowledge about fatness fall short of critically interrogating the very existence of the epidemic. Using the existence of the epidemic as a taken-for-granted starting point for...