Do the leads tell the whole story? An analysis of story leads of the Walkerton, Ontario E. coli contamination of drinking water supplies

Abstract

Despite the availability of a variety of information sources, the news media remain one of the dominant sources of representations of advances in science, technology, government policies and other issues important to society. Some researchers have argued that story leads are important for conveying the content of an entire story and are highly memorable. We seek to address two questions in this article: how reliable is the story lead as a proxy for full text; and to what extent does the emphasis of one type of framing in the story lead influence the details of what people may remember of a particular event? From an analysis of a large media dataset including Canadian national newspaper and televised broadcasts, we compare the content of story leads to the full story text. We also draw on comments from news reporters reflecting on the importance of the lead and story structure principles that they follow in constructing a news story. We compare the results from the media dataset to recollections from participants from general public focus groups. We argue that in this particular case study, the news frames that reporters emphasised (health – illnesses and deaths as a result of the contamination) do not correspond with what average Ontarians from 10 focus groups remembered. We also conclude that while media story leads are an important device used to structure news stories, they do not serve as a good proxy measure for what is actually covered in the full text.

Keywords:

• media
• risk
• communication
• story structure
• perceptions

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the time that participants provided us. Without their contribution, this research would not have been possible. We also acknowledge financial support from two sponsors. The larger study entitled ‘Perception of equivocal public health risk: Drinking water in a post-Walkerton climate' was funded through a standard research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (410-2004-2025) with infrastructure and equipment support from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (9676). Partial support for this research also came from the 2nd author's Tier II Canada Research Chair programme of research in Environment and Health Risk Communication. The authors would like to thank Aynslie Hinds, a graduate student Research Assistant in Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba, for her help in running the SAS statistical analysis and for creating Table 2 for use in this article. We also would like to acknowledge Christine Mazur from the Research in Science Communication Lab in Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba for her helpful edits to this text. Lastly, this article was greatly strengthened due to the comments from two very helpful anonymous reviewers. Their suggestions truly enabled us to present the kind of analysis for which we had been striving.

Notes

1. Bhavnita Mistry has now moved to Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

2. Officially, the national news coverage on the CBC is titled The National. The national news coverage on CTV is called CTV News. However, they will be termed the CBC National News and the CTV National News in this article to keep the focus on national news coverage and the specific broadcaster.