Geographic and Longitudinal Trends in Media Framing of Obesity in the United States

Abstract

The media’s framing of public health issues is closely linked to public opinion on these issues and support for interventions to address these issues. We characterized geographic and temporal variation in the US media’s framing of obesity across states during 2006-2015. Newspaper articles that mentioned the term “obesity” were drawn from Access World News, a comprehensive online database (N=364,288). We employed automated content analysis, a machine learning technique, to categorize articles as attributing obesity to (1) individual-level causes (e.g., lifestyle behaviors), (2) environmental/systemic causes (e.g., neighborhood walkability), (3) both, or (4) articles without any such attribution framework. Nationwide across all years, a higher proportion of articles focused on individual-level attribution of obesity than environmental-level or both attributes. Missouri and Idaho had the highest proportions of articles with an individual framework, and Nevada, Arkansas, and Wisconsin had the highest proportions of articles with an environmental framework. This analysis demonstrates that US media sources heavily focus on an individual framing of obesity, which may be informing public perceptions of obesity. By highlighting differences in obesity media portrayal, this study could inform research to understand why particular states represent outliers and how this may affect obesity policymaking.