Diabetes coverage in Australian newspapers (2013‐2017): A computer‐based linguistic analysis

Abstract

Issue addressed: This study analysed diabetes coverage in 12 Australian metropolitan/national newspapers over a period of 5 years (2013-2017). It aimed to describe quantitative tendencies in diabetes coverage (amount of articles per newspaper and over time) and to identify potential discrepancies between diabetes coverage and societal prevalence of diabetes. The study addressed the following research questions, with a focus on language use: • How frequent are mentions of different types of diabetes? • How are people with diabetes referred to? • How frequent and how distributed are mentions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and matters? Methods: Data were collected in electronic format, manually classified and processed using a specialised software program, with a focus on quantitative analysis. Results: 577 articles were classified as news and 117 were classified as "non-news." The Australian Financial Review published the fewest items, followed by the NT News, while the West Australian and the Advertiser published the most. References to "type 2" appear slightly more frequent and more distributed than to "type 1" diabetes. The labelling of people with the noun diabetic/s occurs in about a quarter of the dataset. References to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or matters appear to be extremely rare in the analysed dataset. Conclusions: Diabetes coverage does not fully align with incidence of diabetes among Australians, and problematic language practices such as the labelling of people as "diabetics" continue to occur. So what? Given the agenda-setting function of the news media, new strategies may be needed to change how Australian metropolitan and national newspapers cover diabetes, especially in relation to incorporating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices and perspectives.

Computer-assisted digital text analysis for journalism and communications research: introducing corpus linguistic techniques that do not require programming

“…and 117 other items (opinion, profiles, personal recounts, etc). More information about the construction of the dataset, called Diabetes News Corpus (DNC), is provided in Bednarek and Carr (2019a, b).…”

The year’s work in stylistics 2020

“…A significant body of work which applies linguistics to scientific and health matters was published in 2020. For example, Deignan and Semino (2020) focus on the metaphors used to discuss climate change in educational material and in interviews with secondary school pupils in the UK and Bednarek and Carr (2020) conduct a computer-based analysis of diabetes coverage in Australian newspapers. Coffey-Glover (2020) uses feminist discourse analysis to investigate the online language of ‘exclusive pumpers’, women who express breastmilk as an alternative to breast feeding or using formula.…”

Invisible or high-risk: Computer-assisted discourse analysis of references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people(s) and issues in a newspaper corpus about diabetes

“…As a first step, the alphabetically-sorted DNC word list was consulted to identify any potential references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people(s) and matters-as briefly summarised in [21] and elaborated on here. As a reminder, a word list is based on the occurrence of single forms; that is, it will list Torres, Strait, and Islander separately.…”

“…This research does argue, however, that 'the language used by the media in communicating about diabetes has the potential to influence general perceptions and attitudes about diabetes in a whole spectrum of people, not just those people living with diabetes but also their spouses, friends, parents, and significant others' [20, p. 493]. Another study [21], which this article builds on and extends, only reported the low number of references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people(s) or matters in diabetes coverage alongside other project results (described in more detail below in 'Frequency and range'). There is a general paucity of research on Australian media representations of Indigenous health [9,17], especially in relation to language use.…”