Consumption culture and "healthism" discourse in printed media as a consumption subject

This thesis aims at investigating the discourse of "healthism" in printed media as consumption culture and consumption subject. Within this scope, the thesis contains four chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion chapters. The first chapter includes the major concepts of the study as "healthism" in addition to medicalization, individualization, biopower and consumption. The second chapter contains the notion of health besides the change in the notion of health and the models of healthy behavior so as to clarify the attitude of individuals while leading a healthy life. The third chapter focuses on how media presents general information about health and it intends to make clear the attitude of media while presenting health news. Moreover, health literacy and its varieties are discussed in this chapter. In the last chapter, methodology of the research and results of the statistical analysis are presented in tables and charts. Besides, results of the analysis of health texts analyzed by critical discourse analysis of Van Dijk are also included in this section in order to investigate how printed media manipulates individuals towards consumption by means of the "healtism" discourse. In this respect, health news of four newspapers of the highest circulation (Posta, Sabah, Sözcü, Hürriyet) and their supplement pages are selected and analyzed by content analysis and critical discourse analysis of Van Dijk. The conclusion of this thesis is that "healthism" discourse plays a role in the medicalization of daily life and individualization of medical problems by means of life plans as a tool of consumption manipulation in the health news of Turkish newspapers.