SARS Wars: An Examination of the Quantity and Construction of Health Information in the News Media

The media have the power to sway public perception of health issues by choosing what to publish and the context in which to present information. The media may influence an individual's tendency to overestimate the risk of some health issues while underestimating the risk of others, ultimately influencing health choices. Although some research has been conducted to examine the number of articles on selected health topics, little research has examined how the messages are constructed. The purpose of this article is to describe an examination of the construction of news reports on health topics using aspects of the social amplification of risk model and the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion for theoretical direction. One hundred news media reports (print, radio, television, and Internet) were analyzed in terms of message repetition, context, source, and grammar. Results showed that health topics were more often discussed in terms of risk, by credible sources using strong language. This content analysis provides an empirical starting point for future research into how such health news may influence consumer's perceptions of health topics.

[1]  R. Reynolds.  Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention , 1993 .

[2]  E. Beck,et al.  Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease , 1973, Zeitschrift für Neurologie.

[3]  Kevin L. Blankenship,et al.  The Role of Different Markers of Linguistic Powerlessness in Persuasion , 2005 .

[4]  P. Slovic.  Perception of risk. , 1987, Science.

[5]  Steve Booth-Butterfield,et al.  The Elaboration Likelihood Model: Its Impacton Persuasion Theory and Research , 2002 .

[6]  James M. Munch,et al.  Rhetorical Question, Summarization Frequency, and Argument Strength Effects on Recall , 1988 .

[7]  Ortwin Renn,et al.  The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework , 1988 .

[8]  Alan R. Andreasen,et al.  Marketing social change , 1995 .

[9]  J. Bryant,et al.  Media effects : advances in theory and research , 2002 .

[10]  V. Covello,et al.  Women's Perceptions of the Risks of Age-Related Diseases, Including Breast Cancer: Reports from a 3-Year Research Study , 2002, Health communication.

[11]  Franziska Marquart,et al.  Communication and persuasion : central and peripheral routes to attitude change , 1988 .

[12]  Everett M. Rogers.  Intermedia proceses and powerful media effects , 2002 .

[13]  K. Gerlach,et al.  Cancer coverage in women's magazines: what information are women receiving? , 2009, Journal of cancer education : the official journal of the American Association for Cancer Education.

[14]  R. Kolbe,et al.  Content-Analysis Research: An Examination of Applications with Directives for Improving Research Reliability and Objectivity , 1991 .

[15]  Everett M. Rogers,et al.  Communication Networks: Toward a New Paradigm for Research , 1980 .

[16]  Charles S. Areni,et al.  The effects of structural and grammatical variables on persuasion: An elaboration likelihood model perspective , 2003 .

[17]  Chanthika Pornpitakpan.  The Persuasiveness of Source Credibility: A Critical Review of Five Decades' Evidence , 2004 .

[18]  M. Heesacker,et al.  Effects of rhetorical questions on persuasion: A cognitive response analysis. , 1981 .

[19]  Adam D. Galinsky,et al.  The history of dual-process notions, and the future of preconscious control. , 1999 .

[20]  G. Faulkner,et al.  Physical activity promotion through the mass media: inception, production, transmission and consumption. , 2005, Preventive medicine.

[21]  Peter Washer,et al.  Representations of SARS in the British newspapers , 2004, Social Science & Medicine.

[22]  James M. Munch,et al.  The Effects of Argument Structure and Affective Tagging on Product Attitude Formation , 1993 .

[23]  N. Signorielli.  Mass Media Images and Impact on Health: A Sourcebook , 1988 .

[24]  R. Petty,et al.  Mass Media Attitude Change: Implications of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion , 2002 .

[25]  E. Maibach,et al.  Relative risk in the news media: a quantification of misrepresentation. , 1997, American journal of public health.

[26]  S. Chaiken,et al.  Dual-process theories in social psychology , 1999 .

[27]  J. Bryant,et al.  Media effects: Advances in theory and research, 2nd ed. , 2002 .