Institute of Collective Health, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador 40.110-040, Brazil.
Research Group for Communication, Health and Education, Department of Public Health, São Paulo State University, Botucatu 18.618-686, Brazil.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Feb 23;18(4):2189. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18042189.
Sources of information are a key part of the news process as it guides certain topics, influencing the media agenda. The goal of this study is to examine the most frequent voices on vaccines in the Portuguese press. A total of 300 news items were analysed via content analysis using as sources two newspapers from 2012 to 2017. Of all the articles, 97.7% included a source ( = 670). The most frequent were "governmental organisations", "professional associations" and the "media". Less frequent sources were "university scientists", "governmental scientific bodies", "consumer groups", "doctors", "scientific companies", "NGOs" and "scientific journals". Most articles used only non-scientific sources ( = 156). A total of 94 articles used both categories and 43 used exclusively scientific sources. Our findings support the assertion that media can be an instrument to disseminate information on vaccines. Nevertheless, despite being present in most articles, the number of sources per article was low, therefore not presenting a diversity of opinions and there was a lack of scientific voices, thus suggesting lower quality of the information being offered to the audience.
信息来源是新闻过程的关键部分，因为它引导着某些话题，影响着媒体议程。本研究的目的是研究葡萄牙新闻界中关于疫苗的最常见声音。通过内容分析，我们对 2012 年至 2017 年的两份报纸上的 300 篇新闻进行了分析。在所有文章中，有 97.7%（=670 篇）包含了一个信息来源。最常见的信息来源是“政府组织”、“专业协会”和“媒体”。较少出现的信息来源是“大学科学家”、“政府科学机构”、“消费者团体”、“医生”、“科学公司”、“非政府组织”和“科学期刊”。大多数文章只使用了非科学来源（=156 篇）。共有 94 篇文章同时使用了这两类来源，43 篇文章只使用了科学来源。我们的研究结果支持这样一种说法，即媒体可以成为传播疫苗信息的工具。然而，尽管大多数文章都出现了信息来源，但每篇文章中的信息来源数量较少，因此没有呈现出多样化的观点，也缺乏科学声音，这表明向受众提供的信息质量较低。
