Framing of Australian newspaper coverage of a secondhand smoke injury claim: Lessons for media advocacy

Abstract

This paper focuses on newspaper coverage of the Marlene Sharp legal case in Australia, concerning a non-smoking bar worker who was awarded damages for laryngeal cancer caused by passive smoking. All Australian metropolitan and Victorian regional newspaper coverage of the case was obtained from a commercial media monitoring agency for the month of May 2001, yielding 100 articles for analysis. A qualitative text analysis was conducted on newspaper articles, coding for content, tone and frame. Coverage of the outcome of the Marlene Sharp case was predominantly positive for tobacco control, with positive coverage (45% of articles) outweighing negative coverage (13% of articles) by a factor of 3 to 1. The most commonly occurring frame (27% of articles) advanced the view that legislation to protect workers from secondhand smoke is appropriate, even overdue, and encouraged the government to create smoke-free policies to protect workers. Other common frames positive for tobacco control included ‘smoking as socially unacceptable’ (9%) and ‘smoking as a societal problem’ (9%). Of articles framed negatively for tobacco control, ‘individual rights’ (5%) and ‘system cynicism’ (5%) were most common. Legal cases present special opportunities for public health media advocates to bring a human face to the need to progress passage of smoke-free policies.

Acknowledgments

The paper was supported by a grant from the US National Cancer Institute State and Community Tobacco Intervention Initiative (Grant no. RO 1 CA86273-01) and by a VicHealth Senior Research Fellowship. The authors would like to thank Kim McLeod for her assistance with coding news articles and Yvonne Lachmann for her help in preparing the manuscript.