Dhoju Sameer, Rony Md Main Uddin, Kabir Muhammad Ashad, Hassan Naeemul
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Mississippi, USA.
School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Australia.
Stud Health Technol Inform. 2019 Aug 21;264:93-97. doi: 10.3233/SHTI190190.
Media outlets play crucial roles in disseminating health information. Previous studies have examined how health journalism is practiced by reliable and unreliable media outlets. However, most of the existing works are conducted over a relatively small set of samples. In this study, we investigate a large collection (about 30 thousand) of health-related news articles which were published by 29 reliable and 20 unreliable media outlets and identify several differences in health journalism practice. Our analysis shows that there are significant structural, topical, and semantic disparities in the way reliable and unreliable media outlets conduct health journalism. We argue, in this age of 'fake news', these findings will be useful to combat online health disinformation.
媒体机构在传播健康信息方面发挥着关键作用。以往的研究探讨了可靠和不可靠的媒体机构如何开展健康新闻报道。然而，现有的大多数研究都是基于相对较少的样本进行的。在本研究中，我们调查了由29家可靠和20家不可靠的媒体机构发表的大量（约3万篇）与健康相关的新闻文章，并确定了健康新闻报道实践中的几个差异。我们的分析表明，可靠和不可靠的媒体机构在开展健康新闻报道的方式上存在显著的结构、主题和语义差异。我们认为，在这个“假新闻”时代，这些发现将有助于打击在线健康虚假信息。
