Who Guides Vaccination in the Portuguese Press? An Analysis of Information Sources

Abstract

Sources of information are a key part of the news process as it guides certain topics, influencing the media agenda. The goal of this study is to examine the most frequent voices on vaccines in the Portuguese press. A total of 300 news items were analysed via content analysis using as sources two newspapers from 2012 to 2017. Of all the articles, 97.7% included a source (n = 670). The most frequent were “governmental organisations”, “professional associations” and the “media”. Less frequent sources were “university scientists”, “governmental scientific bodies”, “consumer groups”, “doctors”, “scientific companies”, “NGOs” and “scientific journals”. Most articles used only non-scientific sources (n = 156). A total of 94 articles used both categories and 43 used exclusively scientific sources. Our findings support the assertion that media can be an instrument to disseminate information on vaccines. Nevertheless, despite being present in most articles, the number of sources per article was low, therefore not presenting a diversity of opinions and there was a lack of scientific voices, thus suggesting lower quality of the information being offered to the audience.

Las fuentes de información sobre vacunas en El País y El Mundo: el efecto covid-19

“…Aunque haya investigaciones sobre fuentes de información y sus clasificaciones en el ámbito de la comunicación (Zaman y Das, 2021;López-Rabadán y Casero-Ripollés, 2014;Traquina, 2013;Gomis, 2004;Gans, 2004;Kim y Weaver, 2003;Fontcuberta, 1993;Van Dijk, 1990;Wolf, 1987) y sobre fuentes de información y noticias sobre salud (Greene et al, 2022;Mayo-Cubero, 2020;Wheatley, 2020;Saavedra-Llamas et al, 2019;Stroobant et al, 2018;Tandoc Jr., 2018, Lopes et al, 2023, son escasos los estudios que han analizado las fuentes de información en la cobertura periodística sobre las vacunas (Gomes y Lopes, 2019;Langbecker y Catalán-Matamoros, 2021;Clarke et al, 2015), aspecto central de este estudio. Teniendo en cuenta que la crisis del coronavirus no ha impactado únicamente la salud, sino muchos otros ámbitos, como es el de la comunicación, este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar el impacto de la pandemia de covid-19 en las fuentes de información utilizadas en la cobertura sobre vacunas en los periódicos españoles El País y El Mundo.…”

How Did Europe's Press Cover Covid-19 Vaccination News? A Five-Country Analysis

“…Comparably less research in computing has been conducted to systematically understand how European media organizations have covered aspects of the pandemic [34], specifically Covid-19 vaccination [10], partly due to the lack of curated multi-country data. For instance, existing research has analyzed the sources used by journalists to report on health news in countries like Spain [7] or Portugal [16]. Other research relates to the analysis of news about Covid-19 vaccination shared on Facebook or Twitter in Italy [31].…”