Hypervisibility meets hyperinvisibility: anti-fatness, moral panics, and mainstream U.S. news coverage of fat people taking Ozempic and Wegovy
Breanne Fahs, Eric Swank
Abstract
Following the explosion of interest in GLP-1s from 2021 onward, U.S. news media coverage has focused extensively on weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy (known as GLP-1s). Nevertheless, little is known about how fat people are portrayed in news media coverage of weight-loss drugs. In this study, we conducted an ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of how fat people were represented in 749 news articles about GLP-1s in two major U.S. newspapers (New York Times and USA Today), looking at their coverage of both Ozempic and Wegovy from January 2023 through January 2025. We highlighted four major patterns in how fat people and weight-loss drugs were discussed in the mainstream news media: 1) Fat people were made invisible, particularly by not talking to fat people, treating fatness as monolithic, and prioritizing small fat over larger body sizes; 2) Weight-loss drugs were seen as an avenue to thinness and a mechanism for escape and rescue from fatness, just the actual amount of weight people typically lost was obscured; 3) Moral panics ensued about fat people as burdensome, mob-like, and undeserving of access to expensive weight-loss drugs; and 4) Sympathy with fat people and how insurance companies harmed fat people appeared. We explored the hypervisibility/hyperinvisibility implications for media coverage of weight-loss drugs and anti-fatness, the reinforcement of stigma and moral panics on conversations about GLP-1s, and the see-sawing between the “greedy” fat person and the greedy profit-driven pharmaceutical industry as problematic.