Flu News You Can Use? An Analysis of Flu News Quality 2008-2010

Rationale: Public health behaviors can be influenced by the public's perceptions of health news content. Public persuasion about being more vigilant with vaccination compliance is important in preventing the spread of flu and diminishing the severity of infection. In theory, moderate to poor flu vaccination rates among Americans could reflect subpar flu news quality. The news quality factors in this study are categorized in terms of main or general persuasiveness based on common or infrequent reference in the communications literature.;Context and Objective: The premise of this research is that in order for the public to have strong knowledge and decision power of whether or not to comply with the annual flu shot, eligible persons or guardians need to be fully informed and reminded about the importance of disease complications and health authority recommendations regarding prevention. The breadth of health information constitutes an evaluative communications quality factor referred to as information completeness. In total, six persuasiveness factors are applied to evaluate the quality to news stories on flu. The primary goal of this research is to assess the overall quality of flu-related communications provided through the mass media in national newspapers and televised news that were distributed during May 2008-October 2010 (including the 2009 H1N1 pandemic).;Approach: A systematic content analysis was performed under the structured framework of the Health Belief Model to assess televised and newsprint flu news for information completeness and balance, which are two common communications quality features. The level of overall news quality was evaluated for not only information completeness, balance and accuracy collectively referred to as main persuasiveness, but also news salience, informant source credibility, and presence of alleviatory or clarifying content collectively referred to as general persuasiveness. To determine which of these factors reflect better determinants of higher news quality, secondary quality factor analyses were performed to determine potential contribution of each news quality factor.;Findings: The quality of flu news between television and newsprint sources was determined to be of a comparable moderate quality level. Information completeness was the prominent quality factor contributing to higher news quality. The reassurance provided through messages of novel concern clarifications and comforting concepts that address common public fears and misconceptions also contributed to higher news quality, thus suggesting that this type of content needs to be more frequently applied by the media. The overall mediocre quality of flu news reflected a balanced disease risk frame and relatively high accuracy in conjunction with an imbalanced prevention approaches frame and lack of vaccine safety discussions. Perpetuated, yet unnecessary mention of unrepeated adverse events from decades ago, myths, or other exaggerations about the flu vaccine did not appear to undermine news quality. Consultation with credible informants such as government or medical authorities contributed to news quality, although not to the same level as the main persuasiveness factors. Broadcast news in the morning and evening was of a similar quality; however, the news quality of the east coast newspapers was slightly higher than that of newspapers from the western regions.;Conclusion: Salient flu news occurs at a low baseline level in the print and broadcast media and may slightly increase during a fall to spring season, or more certainly during an escalating global epidemic or pandemic. Lessons learned from content analysis of flu news enlighten us on the media agenda, while identification of information gaps points to areas in vaccine safety and other flu prevention news communications that can be improved upon.