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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Fear of Fat By Laura Fraser Fat has been a matter of huge media interest lately, if you’ll pardon the pun. As a nation, we’re wrestling with the fact that we’re getting fatter and fatter all the time—on average, we’ve gained eight pounds apiece in the past decade—and we don’t know what,if anything, can be done about it. The news about fat is confusing: On the one hand, some obesity experts say that even being a little chubby puts us at a greatly increased health risk; on the other, psychologists and exercise physiologists tell us that dieting can be damaging, exercise is what counts, and that weight obsession is a fate far worse than love handles. One headline in Self shouts that 15 extra pounds can kill you; another in Newsweek (4/21/97) questions, "Does it matter what you weigh?" As the media try, on the surface, to sort through the weight debate, what’s being communicated underneath, in many cases, is our society’s deeply held moral and aesthetic prejudice against being heavier than a thin ideal. Magazines may write about the fact that you don’t have to be runway thin to be healthy, but they stop short of picturing anyone with a little extra flab. They know what sells. As a journalist who has written about obesity for many magazines, and as an author whose book on the diet industry, Losing It, made me the Weight Expert of the Week recently, I’ve seen up-close how strong the bias against fat people runs in the media, and how that prejudice confuses the real news about weight. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1388 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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