Cancer Coverage in General-Audience and Black Newspapers

Abstract

This article presents findings from the first study of cancer news coverage in a national sample of Black and general-audience newspapers. We compared 2,439 health news stories from 23 weekly Black newspapers to 2,767 health news stories from a constructed week sample of 12 daily general-audience newspapers, both collected between April 1, 2004, and March 31, 2005. Analyses examined differences in the amount and nature of cancer coverage, specifically cancer sites, disparities, localization, and personally mobilizing health information for readers. Cancer was the main topic in a higher proportion of health stories in Black newspapers than in general-audience newspapers (13.6% vs. 9.6%; p = .001). Among cancer stories, those in Black newspapers had more localization (p = .004), disparity information (p = .001), and personal mobilization information (p = .001) than those in general-audience newspapers. In neither type of newspaper did the distribution of stories by cancer site accurately reflect the impact of different cancers on population mortality.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was funded by the National Cancer Institute, Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research initiative (1 P50 CA 095815). The authors thank Jon Stemmle, Paul Atkins, Petya Eckler, Nneka Ekunno, Mark Graves, Aisha Langford, Lillie McDaniels, Hans Meyer, Meghan Maskery, Melissa Paulen, Erin Sirianni, Santosh Vijaykumar, and Monica Wohlberg for their assistance in reviewing and coding newspaper stories.

Notes

¹To avoid biases in the sample, two cities were removed from the sampling frame: (a) a city with a daily Black newspaper unsuited for comparison to weekly newspapers in the other markets, and (b) the city in which the researchers resided.

²The authors acknowledge the tensions recently documented by Long, Slater, Boiarsky, Stapel, and Keef (2005) between the goals of purposive sampling (see Riffe, Lacy, & Fico, 1998) and the advantages of constructing a nationally representative sample of local news media outlets, particularly those media outlets for which audience information is either not reliable or not readily available. These data are part of a multiyear NCI-funded Center for Excellence in Cancer Communication Research examining the nature and extent of news coverage in 24 weekly Black and 12 large daily, commercial newspapers in small and major metropolitan market areas. Newspaper issues were first identified for articles for permissible inclusion in the dataset. Given the number of issues from these papers over the span of 1 year, and the large number of stories in the collection, the study represents with confidence 95% of the universe of issues under consideration. Although the error of missing issues produces numerous overlooked stories beyond random inclusion error at the story level, given the power of these existing data, such error will not influence the effects reported here or descriptions of the average number of stories in an issue on a variety of health topics.

³A smaller number of articles were coded for localized information, as this variable was added for coding of cancer stories after a minor revision of the codebook at the beginning of June 2004. A total of 372 valid cancer stories were coded for this variable across newspapers.

⁴There was substantial agreement about the construct; a calculation of percentage agreement between three coders yielded an average 94% concurrence.

⁵As in the case of general-audience newspapers, in some Black newspapers health stories appear grouped together on a single page, which is why we do make a note of this practice, which differs by publisher. This also varies considerably in general-audience newspapers, and although there may be considerably more health stories on a particular day, the practice in Black newspapers is not identical. Using the issue containing a health news story as the comparison point is in our best estimation the best way to compare the type of health news storytelling occurring in each newspaper universe.