A Corpus-Based Study of Representation of obesity in China Daily and the Associated Press: Critical Discourse Analysis Approach

Shuxian SONG

Abstract


Obesity is a persistently newsworthy topic for the press and in recent years levels of coverage have increased. In this study, we examine the ways in which obesity has been framed by the press over a five-year period (2017-2021), focusing both on similar and different areas of the two media. The study takes a corpus-based approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), examining obesity-related discourses in two corpora: one containing articles about obesity from China Daily and the other from the Associated Press. Discourses are identified through word frequency, concordance lines and keywords analysis - techniques in corpus linguistics which highlights words that occur with a statistically marked frequency in one corpus compared to another. The analysis found that the word risk and negative adjectives were frequently used in the media on both sides to describe obesity to increase awareness and awareness of obesity. But there are still differences China Daily is more concerned with obesity in teens, women and the elderly, and has more coverage than the Associated Press. Compared with the Associated Press, China Daily pays more attention to the responsibility of the state and society when providing solutions to obesity, but the Associated Press mainly deals with legislation. The media in both countries need to pay more attention to the role of individuals in tackling obesity, and the Associated Press should pay more attention to health equity and pay more attention to vulnerable groups in future reports.


Keywords


Obesity; Media discourse; Corpus-based; Critical discourse analysis

Full Text:

PDF

References


Baker, P. (2019). Analyzing representations of obesity in the daily mail via corpus and down-sampling methods. In Using corpus methods to triangulate linguistic analysis (pp.85-108). Routledge.

Brookes, G. (2021). “Lose weight, save the NHS”: Discourses of obesity in press coverage of COVID-19. Critical Discourse Studies, 1-19.

Brookes, G., & Baker, P. (2021). Fear and responsibility: discourses of obesity and risk in the UK press. Journal of Risk Research. DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2020.1863849

CBC News. (2020). Roughly 40% of U.S. adults are obese, 10% severely so, CDC survey shows [original data]. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/roughly-40-of-u-s-adults-are-obese-10-very-much-so-cdc-survey-shows/?intcid=CNM-00-10abd1h

Caulfield, T., Alfonso, V., & Shelley, J. (2009). Deterministic?: Newspaper representations of obesity and genetics. The Open Obesity Journal, 1(1).

Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (2017). BMJ: Obesity is strongly associated with 11 types of cancer (breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, esophageal adenocarcinoma…) [original data]. https://www.chinacdc.cn/gwxx/201703/t20170307_138829.html

Couch, D., Thomas, S. L., Lewis, S., et al. (2015). Obese adults’ perceptions of news reporting on obesity: The Panopticon and Synopticon at work. Sage Open, 5(4), 2158244015612522.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Language Analysis. London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. (2014). A dialectical-relation approach to critical discourse analysis in social research. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd ed., pp.162-186).Beijing: Peking University Press.

Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. In: van Dijk TA (Ed.), Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction (pp.258-284). London: SAGE Publications Ltd..

Fowler, R. (2001) Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., et al. (1986). Living with television: The dynamics of the cultivation process. Perspectives on Media Effects, 1986, 17-40.

Holland, K. E., Blood, R. W., Thomas, S. I., et al. (2011). Our girth is plain to see: An analysis of newspaper coverage of Australia’s Future “Fat Bomb”. Health, Risk & Society, 13(1), 31-46.

Xiong, J. G. (2022). Associated-Press-obesity-corpus2017-22[original data]. https://gitee.com/panforever/associated-press-obesity-corpus2017-22/tree/master//

Li, K., & Zhang, Q. (2022). A corpus-based study of representation of Islam and Muslims in American media: Critical Discourse Analysis Approach. International Communication Gazette, 84(2), 157-180.

Public Health England. (2020a). Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/892085/disparities_review.pdf

Ruth, W., & Meyer, M. (2015). Critical discourses studies: History, agenda, theory and methodology. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse studies. London: SAGE Publications Ltd..

Seale, C. (2003). Media and health. International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, 16 (4). https://doi.org/10.1108/ijhcqa.2003.06216dae.007.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2001). Critical discourse analysis. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E. Hamilton (Eds.), The Handbook of discourse analysis (p.352). Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Lexical Analysis Software Ltd. (1996). Wordsmith (Version 8.0) [Computer Software]. Word Smith Tools. Lexical Analysis Software and Oxford University Press.

Xiong, J. G. (2021). China daily query and downloader[CP/OL]. http:/gitee.com/panforever/chinadailyquerydownload.git

Shao, B., & Hui, Z. M. (2014). The “Chinese Dream” in the perspective of western media——A corpus-based critical discourse analysis. Foreign Languages Research, 6, 28-33.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12780

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2022 Author(s)

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

 

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture