A National Surveillance System for Tracking Tobacco News Stories

Still a burning issue: trends in the volume, content and population reach of newspaper coverage about tobacco issues

“…Often these articles were objecting to further tax increases on tobacco or arguing against notions that continuing smokers should not have access to expensive surgical procedures. Our pattern of findings for this 6-year period is broadly similar to the characteristics of coverage over the year 2001 in Australia (Durrant et al 2003) and several studies of US newspaper coverage that fell within our study period , Nelson et al 2007). However, Long et al (2006) found a lower frequency of newspaper coverage and fewer mentions of health effects.…”

“…The few studies describing news coverage on tobacco have found that it garners relatively frequent coverage, that tobacco policy dominates tobacco-related coverage, and that most coverage is cast favorably from a tobacco control perspective (Stillman et al 2001, Durrant et al 2003, Long et al 2006, Smith et al 2006, Nelson et al 2007. Only the study by Stillman et al, which gathered data between 1994 and1998, permitted an explicit examination of changes over time in news coverage on tobacco, but there is no more recent assessment of time trends.…”

“…In addition, the volume of tobacco-related news coverage on television is far lower than the amount of coverage afforded by newspapers (Long et al 2006, Nelson et al 2007). Therefore, this study focuses exclusively on the way that tobacco issues are reported in Australian newspapers.…”

News Media Outreach and Newspaper Coverage of Tobacco Control

“…Presence of youth tobacco use and health effects themes has been shown in other recent studies (Durrant et al, 2003;Menashe & Siegel, 1998;Nelson et al, 2007;Smith et al, 2005). However, media coverage of tobacco policy issues, particularly for secondhand smoke, has been more commonly reported elsewhere (Durrant et al, 2003;Llaguno-Aguilar et al, 2008;Long et al, 2006;Nelson et al, 2007;Smith et al, 2005).…”

“…First, we searched the LexisNexis electronic database (www.lexisnexis.com), which contains more than 20,000 news information sources. A 72-hour period following release of the outreach material was selected based on the estimated life cycle of a typical news story (Li, Chapman, Agho, & Eastman, 2008) Second, the CDC/OSH Tobacco Media Monitoring Surveillance System (Nelson et al, 2007) of which 25 were included in the study.…”