Celebrity Politicians as Health-Promoting Role Models in the Media: the Cases of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Benja
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Celebrity Politicians as Health-Promoting Role Models in the Media: the Cases of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu Narmina Abdulaev 1,2 & Baruch Shomron 1 Accepted: 29 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
In recent years, scholars have increasingly revealed the importance of celebrities in society, among them celebrity politicians. These celebrities not only influence political attitudes but also serve as role models for many individuals. Yet, little is known regarding what types of role models’ politicians serve as in the context of health. To fill this gap, we examined three influential contemporary political leaders: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and the type of mediated role models each possibly comprise in the context of healthy living. By conducting a qualitative content analysis, we analyzed 90 articles from 2018 to 2019 from two leading newspapers in each of the three politician’s countries, namely Russia, the USA, and Israel as well as the respective politician’s Facebook pages. Our findings point to three types of potential role models’ as political leaders: a health-promoting model (Putin), a hybrid model (Trump), and a model of non-existence (Netanyahu), as the literature points to mediated role models influencing individuals’ beliefs and behaviors. This study contributes to the understanding of mediated types of role models’ politicians potentially serve as in the context of health vital to people’s personal health. Keywords Celebrities . Celebrity politicians . Role models . Social learning . Public health
Narmina Abdulaev and Baruch Shomron contributed equally to this article.
* Baruch Shomron [email protected] Narmina Abdulaev [email protected]
1
The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Communications Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, 84105 Beer-Sheva, Israel
2
Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Abdulaev and Shomron
Introduction “The president [Vladimir Putin] never welcomed smoking, he is a supporter of a healthy lifestyle (...) There are only a few colleagues who smoke, there are fewer of them than fingers on the hand, in general this is now very unpopular, which is encouraging,” said a Kremlin spokesman (https://www.kp.ru/online/news/3621031/) Celebrities are not a new phenomenon, and scholars have identified many individuals from the past three centuries as celebrities. Indeed, celebrity culture has been playing a significant role in society for generations. The rise of celebrities, and prominent among them celebrity politicians has gone hand in hand with the rise of mass media and new communication technologies. Thus, celebrity culture is in constant development and change both influencing and being influenced by society. The literature has shown that celebrities can have an important impact on their audiences. This impact ranges from encouraging people to consume specific commercial
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