Comparing Local TV News with National TV News in Cancer Coverage: An Exploratory Content Analysis

Abstract

The authors compared local TV news with national TV news in terms of cancer coverage using a nationally representative sample of local nightly TV and national network TV (i.e., ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) cancer news stories that aired during 2002 and 2003. Compared with national TV news, local TV cancer stories were (a) much shorter in length, (b) less likely to report on cancer prevention (i.e., preventive behaviors and screening tests), and (c) less likely to reference national organizations (i.e., National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration) that have made clear recommendations about ways to prevent cancer. The implications of these findings for health communication research and cancer education were discussed.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Jeff Niederdeppe, Michael McCluskey, John Dimmick, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

¹All kappas for the pairs of coders are available upon request from the first author.

²Although we combine some of these items into a bigger category to test our hypotheses, we report reliability of each item separately. This is because “practice of averaging reliability coefficients across variables is inappropriate. It obviously results in the obscuring of low reliabilities that do not pass muster … Reliability coefficients must be reported separately for each and every measured variable” (Neuendorf, 2002, pp. 142–143; see also Krippendorff, 2004, p. 429).

Note. χ²(1) = 2.05, p = .15; phi = .16; odds ratio = 2.

³Because our sample size is small, one may argue that the chi-square test may be underpowered. However, we decided to report the χ² statistic because no expected counts dip below 5 in Table 1. Also, the one-way Fisher's exact test confirms that there is no statistically significant association between the type of cancer news and the mention of a specific person with cancer (p = .12).

Note. χ²(1) = 4.06, p = .04; phi = .22; odds ratio = 3.

Note. Fisher's exact test p = .01 (two-sided); odds ratio = 6.18.

⁴There are no agreed-upon acceptable levels of a variety of intercoder reliability coefficients (Krippendorff, 2004; Neundorff, 2002). Compared with percent agreement, however, such beyond-chance statistics as Cohen's kappa and Scott's pi are allowed a more liberal criterion by researchers. This is because “Both pi and kappa have been criticized as being overly conservative, giving credit only to agreement beyond chance, a tough challenge in the case of extreme distributions” (Neuendorf, 2002, p. 151). A few scholars have proposed some criteria for Cohen's kappa. For example, Benerjee, Capozzoli, McSweeney, and Sinha (1999) contended that .75 to 1 indicates excellent agreement beyond chance; a kappa coefficient of .40 to .75 fair to good agreement beyond chance; and a variable below .40 should be dropped from data analysis. Likewise, Landis and Koch (1977) proposed that .81 to 1.00 indicates substantial agreement; .61 to .80 moderate agreement; .41 to .60 fair agreement; and below .40 poor agreement.