Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University.
Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Stony Brook University.
Health Commun. 2019 Dec;34(14):1816-1823. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2018.1536949. Epub 2018 Oct 25.
Do national and local papers report on health threats in the same way? This question is investigated in an important and increasingly common context: the outbreak of an infectious disease. Although there is a large literature on how to measure the quality of health reporting, scant attention has been devoted to the role of audience considerations. We address this gap by comparing coverage of the 2016 Zika outbreak in the , a prestigious national newspaper, and the , a well-regarded Florida newspaper. Based on an original content analysis, we find that audience considerations led to higher quality coverage in the local paper, particularly as it relates to avoiding infection. However, certain features of reporting, such as sensationalist language and imprecise risk information, were indistinguishable across the two outlets, which illustrates the challenges faced by reporters at both kinds of papers when it comes to accurately portraying risk.
国内外报纸的健康威胁报道方式相同吗？在一个重要且日益普遍的背景下探讨了这个问题：传染病的爆发。尽管有大量关于如何衡量健康报道质量的文献，但很少有人关注受众因素的作用。我们通过比较 2016 年寨卡病毒爆发期间的报道，解决了这一差距，这是一份有影响力的全国性报纸和一份备受推崇的佛罗里达州报纸。基于一项原创的内容分析，我们发现，受众因素导致当地报纸的报道质量更高，尤其是在避免感染方面。然而，在这两个渠道中，某些报道特征，如耸人听闻的语言和不精确的风险信息，是无法区分的，这说明了记者在准确描述风险时所面临的挑战。
