ArticleJournal of health communication2011
Including limitations in news coverage of cancer research: effects of news hedging on fatalism, medical skepticism, patient trust, and backlash.
Article in Journal of health communication, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Health Media Literacy Intervention Increases Skepticism of Both Inaccurate and Accurate Cancer News Among U.S. Adults.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2024Trial
- How Do Behavioral Framing, Linguistic Certainty, and Target Specification Impact Responses to Vaping Prevention Messages?Journal of health communication · 2024Trial
- Effects of modified risk tobacco product claims on consumer comprehension and risk perceptions of IQOS.Tobacco control · 2022Trial
- The Effects of Website Traits and Medical Skepticism on Patients' Willingness to Follow Web-Based Medical Advice: Web-Based Experiment.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Trial
- Confusion and nutritional backlash from news media exposure to contradictory information about carbohydrates and dietary fats.Public health nutrition · 2019Trial
- Rewriting Doom: Serial Pathways from eHealth Use to Reduced Cancer Fatalism in Family Cancer History Groups.Journal of cancer education : the official journal of the American Association for Cancer Education · 2026Article
- Factors Predicting Information Overload During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Digital Age: Longitudinal Study.Interactive journal of medical research · 2025Article
- Uncertainty communication, trust and health promotion.Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice · 2025Article
- "There is a God or There is No God-It is in the Hands of God:" Fatalistic Beliefs Among Israeli People About Cancer and Their Impact on Behavioral Outcomes.Journal of religion and health · 2023Article
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- Media Exposure, Cancer Beliefs, and Cancer-Related Information-Seeking or Avoidance Behavior Patterns in China.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Antecedents and Consequences of Information Overload in the COVID-19 Pandemic.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- Revisiting nutrition backlash: Psychometric properties and discriminant validity of the nutrition backlash scale.Nutrition (Burbank, Los Angeles County, Calif.) · 2020Article
- Testing the Effects of Certain versus Hypothetical Language in Health Risk Messages.Communication monographs · 2020Article
- Communicating uncertainty about facts, numbers and science.Royal Society open science · 2019Review
- Assessing the impact of the public nutrition information environment: Adapting the cancer information overload scale to measure diet information overload.Patient education and counseling · 2019Article
- Communicating Uncertain Science to the Public: How Amount and Source of Uncertainty Impact Fatalism, Backlash, and Overload.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2017Article
- Fatalism and exposure to health information from the media: examining the evidence for causal influence.Annals of the International Communication Association · 2017Article
- Comparing local TV news with national TV news in cancer coverage: an exploratory content analysis.Journal of health communication · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Past research has demonstrated that news coverage of cancer research, and scientific research generally, rarely contains discourse-based hedging, including caveats, limitations, and uncertainties. In a multiple message experiment (k = 4 news stories, N = 1082), the authors examined whether hedging shaped the perceptions of news consumers. The results revealed that participants were significantly less fatalistic about cancer (p = .039) and marginally less prone to nutritional backlash (p = .056) after exposure to hedged articles. Participants exposed to articles mentioning a second researcher (unaffiliated with the present study) exhibited greater trust in medical professions (p = .001). The findings provide additional support for the inclusion of discourse-based hedging in cancer news coverage and suggest that news consumers will use scientific uncertainty in illness representations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.