I cant see how it makes any difference who commissioned the report.
The joy (or, perhaps, misery) of a qualification in Media Studies is that I
can see how it makes a difference who commissioned a study.
Truth is a very mutable commodity. Perhaps the easiest example of how mutable is filmed documentaries. Viewers think "This is true, I am seeing the evidence before my very eyes", but the fact is that the director chooses what to point his or her camera at, and the editor chooses what frames make it into the final cut. I'm sure no-one here would take Sergei Eisenstein's early work nor the Nazi propogandist (yet skilfully made) documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl as "Truth". And absolutely nobody sensible would take Birth of a Nation as True, even though D. W. Griffiths invented many of the ways in which cinematographers now work.
Back to the subject of a study, then. The person commissioning it will advise which questions they want asking. They will set the parameters of the study. They will decide what is in and what is out of scope. And they will decide the goal of the study (because all studies have a goal in mind, else there is nothing to study). It is also possible to discount results which do not support the study's goal, or to tackle those results and "prove" them the exception rather than the rule - the latter is standard A-Level essaying technique, so imagine what a bunch of researchers and marketers with degrees can come up with.
I'm neither supporting nor denouncing this particular study. I never accept a news item from a single source as "truth", because even though journalism claims to be non-biased, the fact is that a journalist chooses what to write about, and an editor chooses what to publish (and having been both an editor and a writer over the years, I can assure you an editor targets their publication to their audience, and writers who don't just don't get published).
The key that this particular study is a marketing exercise is in this one line: "It means
three in four obese people do not realise
their health is at risk,
warns Slimming World which
commissioned the study to mark its 40th anniversary."
Breaking this down using the ole Media Studies toolbox, how this sentence reads to the subconscious mind of the reader is this:
"Three in four people are fat. That's a 75% chance of it being YOU, fatty. Being fat is dangerous. Slimming World are successful - they've lasted 40 years! You're fat. You should go to Slimming World."
It's one of the most insidious forms of marketing there is, because people tend to blip over adverts, but they pay attention to "news". Particularly news which carries strong, attention grabbing words like
warn,
clinically (smacks of authority, carrying the weight of doctors),
research (again, voice of authority),
devastating (Oh my god, you could DIE! Everybody panic!),
morbidly (again, you could DIE!), and
significant improvements (Thank god! Save me, Slimming World, save me!).
It's how you tell any story. You go down, and down, and down, and you hit the bottom, and then the messiah appears. Hurrah! And what's the final?
Battle against obesity.
We're liking to wage war on things in this last decade. Waging war sells copy, it gets people angry and passionate, it makes them get up and do things. And, sure, some people might get up and go join Slimming World. Obviously not everyone who reads that piece will. Marketing's like that = You can have your advert seen by 100 people, and 10 might take an interest. But only 1 will follow through that interest and become a customer, maybe even fewer.
When your advert comes as a news story from a right-wing paper whose job is to shock its readers and grab their attention to make them buy a copy? Well, then you're targetting an audience who likes to be shocked and appalled. Your hit rate will be far higher. Your successes more than just 1 in 100.
Ultimately Slimming World does help a lot of people. But it
is a business, and businesses need customers if they're to make money and stay in business. While I wouldn't say that the study is nonsense because SW commissioned it, I would say that often it really does matter who's supplying the money.