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Abstract
This study seeks to determine a parsimonious set of media indicators to represent the national media news environment at the daily, weekly, and monthly levels. It provides evidence of the convergent validity of these indicators using cancer and drunk driving news coverage for 1981–2006, and of criterion validity using cancer news coverage for 2003–2006. Validated search terms were used to retrieve stories about cancer and drunk driving from the Lexis-Nexis database. Results revealed that, of the indicators selected, the best aggregate measure of the national news environment is a combined measure of Associated Press, Washington Post, and New York Times. Together, these three sources consistently predicted national newspaper, broadcast, and combined news environment at the daily, weekly, and monthly levels. Since the convergent validity test revealed that the relationship between AP, WPOST, and NYT varies across health topics and time, use of a single indicator is not recommended.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Robert Hornik and Martin Fishbein for their thoughtful review of this manuscript. Their feedback was invaluable.
Notes
1For debates about using general media exposure, versus attention, see (CitationSlater, 2004) and Romantan et al. in this issue.
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Media Exposure conference at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, April 2007.