Casual Attributions And Frames:the Presentation Of Chinese Media For Obesity

Over the past several years,the number of oveweights in China has grown substantially,and obesity is now an increasingly crucial problem in China.The causes of obesity have been associated with a variety of genetic,systemic,and individual behaviors.The media attribution of obesity will arise the debate on the question of who is responsible for causing and curing this emergency epidemic.Previous research suggests that public health problems become amenable to broad policy solutions when those problems can be reframed in systemic terms—specially,in terms of involuntary risk,universal risk,environmental risk,and knowingly created risk.With the gradually severe obesity problem,this study attempts to find out what the media attributed the issue to and what solutions they provide.For both the children and the adults,are the attributions as well as the solutions the same?To get better understand how obesity is reported in China,especially the attributions and the solutions,we conducted a content analysis of the coverage of obesity in People s Daily,Southern Metropolis Daily,and Health News,from 2000 to 2016.We found that obesity was less reported in Chinese media,and the problems of obesity were unbalanced constructed.According to our research,the media attributes obesity to personal behavior(eg,unhealthy diet and lack of exercise),and could only be healed by the individuals themselves(such as more exercise and healthier dietary structures,etc.).The influence of social systems is much less analyzed.In their reports,the media concludes the same reason for both children and adults,which is,the very common one,personal behavior.Meanwhile,as for adult obesity,apart from the individuals of unreasonable behavior,genetic and physiological reasons are also proposed.Correspondingly,the solutions for adults are mainly the change of lifestyles and medical treatment.On the other hand,when they report the causes of children obesity these media explore not only individual behavors,but more system factors such as the lack of health education and heavy academic pressure.Therefore,social responsibility is more emphasized in their solutions of children obesity.The three different types of newspaper attribute the problem of obesity to personal reasons,however,"Health News" relatively more emphasis biological factors on obesity and the use of medical treatment to solve the problem;while "People's Daily" takes obesity as the result of social system's imperfection,believe that the problem should be solved by the improvement of food industry,school education,etc.In this paper,we give recommendations on the reports of obesity as well as the research results and significance.