Media coverage of Canada <i>'</i> s obesity epidemic: illustrating the subtleties of surveillance medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Obesity was once considered a lifestyle issue; recently it has become an ‘epidemic’. Media coverage presents an opportunity to explore this phenomenon. A framing analysis was conducted on obesity media coverage in one representative Canadian newspaper in 1996, 2000 and 2005/06. The analysis finds that by 2005, an obesity epidemic is unquestioned. However, it does not support others’ findings that obesity is attributed to the decline of western civilization and blamed on lazy individuals who overeat. To relate obesity to such factors flies in the face of capitalistic progress, which demands continued production and consumption. Obesity in Canadian media is presented almost as an opportunity: an obstacle impeding national progress, but one that with a great deal of collective, focused effort, can be overcome. Armstrong's ‘surveillance medicine’, where responsibility for one's health is internalized, focuses the discussion. In turn, the analysis builds on Armstrong's concept, illustrating that the downloading of responsibility to the citizen is not a one-way transfer. The state may benefit by shifting the responsibility for health to the individual, but there are benefits to reclaiming that responsibility at times. An epidemic provides an opportunity to strengthen national pride and enhance an increasingly significant Canadian health research enterprise, thereby stimulating the economy and positioning the country as a world leader. This does not suggest that calling obesity an epidemic serves no population health goals, but simply highlights that by creating a groundswell of concern that in turn justifies immediate action, it does much more.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".