Discourses of Diabetes in the Australian News Media

Posted by admin on

By Monika Bednarek

In late 2017, I was lucky enough to be awarded a Multidisciplinary Arts and Social Sciences Inaugural Fellowship for a new corpus linguistic project on Discourses of diabetes in the Australian news media. Work started in early 2018 with consultation of diabetes scholars affiliated with the Charles Perkins Centre to gain initial input and help refine research questions and continued with the collection of a new corpus of recent diabetes coverage, with the help of Georgia Carr. In total, Georgia collected about a quarter of a million words (almost 700 articles) from 12 Australian newspapers (Table 1).

Table 1 Articles in the Diabetes News Corpus

We then collaborated on a series of corpus linguistic and computational analyses of the Diabetes News Corpus. The computational analyses (e.g. named entity recognition) were supported by the Sydney Informatics Hub, and the project received further support (from 2019 onwards) through a Sydney Research Accelerator prize. Our analyses focussed on issues such as:

  • The quantity of items across newspapers and regions
  • The topics and types of diabetes represented, as well as frequent words in headlines
  • The geographical focus and organisations mentioned
  • References to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people(s) or issues
  • Preferred and dispreferred language use
  • Language pointing to blame and stigma (who is ‘responsible’ for diabetes)
  • The sources who are cited in newspapers

As part of our project, we disseminated findings in presentations at conferences and symposia as well as in a suite of academic articles:

Initial findings: Bednarek, M. and G. Carr (2019/Online First) Diabetes coverage in Australian newspapers (2013-2017): A computer-based linguistic analysis. Health Promotion Journal of Australia 31/3: 497-503. https://doi.org/10.1002/hpja.295

Specific study: Bednarek, M. (2020) 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. PLoS ONE 15/6: e0234486. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234486 (open access)

Further project findings, with added focus on the corpus linguistic methods: Bednarek, M. and G. Carr (2020/Online First) Computer-assisted digital text analysis for journalism and communications research: Introducing corpus linguistic techniques that do not require programming. Media International Australia. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1329878X20947124

To supplement these articles, we wrote a detailed corpus manual and created an Open Science Framework project page, with additional information on our methodology, etc. And we created research outputs for other stakeholders such as diabetes organisations, healthcare professionals, journalists, and people with diabetes:

Initial findings: Executive summary (2018) : ‘Diabetes in the news’ and 3-minute video summary (2019): ‘Diabetes in the media’.

Tip sheet (for journalists): ‘Writing about diabetes’

Final project report: Bednarek, M. and G. Carr (2020) Diabetes in the news: Project report.

To reach healthcare professionals who specialise in diabetes, we have summarised the project and its overall findings in our most recent article, ‘Australian diabetes news media coverage’, for the Australian Diabetes Educator, published by Australia’s leading organisation for diabetes care and education.

The project has now been completed, but others are welcome to use the Diabetes News Corpus to undertake additional analyses or for use in teaching. Information about accessing the corpus can be found here.