"Det är som om vi inte ens existerar"
En studie av Aftonbladet och Dagens Nyheters rapportering om ätstörningar hos män 2010-2012
The title is a quote from a blog entry written by the Swedish journalist Linus Fremin. For many years Fremin suffered from bulimia and he claims that men for a long time have been excluded from medias coverage of eating disorders.We wanted to try this thesis and decided to do a quantitative study of articles published in two Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter, regarding eating disorders during the period 20101129-20121129. We studied 199 articles and counted the occurrence of men and women in the texts.Our study showed that women were represented in a majority of the articles, whereas the men were clearly much more absent. In most of the articles eating disorders were described as a female issue and men were rarely included. It?s difficult to say how the ideal division of men and women in media?s coverage of eating disorders should look like. Perhaps the ideal to strive for is not ?fifty-fifty?, since more women than men today are diagnosed with an eating disorder. But it is important to know that this exclusion of men in media?s coverage of eating disorders contributes to the public opinion that eating disorders is an non-issue among men.