Quality assessment of nutrition coverage in the media: a 6-week survey of five popular UK newspapers

Objectives

To investigate the quality of nutrition articles in popular national daily newspapers in the UK and to identify important predictors of article quality.

Setting

Newspapers are a primary source of nutrition information for the public.

Design

Newspaper articles were collected on 6 days of the week (excluding Sunday) for 6 weeks in summer 2014. Predictors included food type and health outcome, size of article, whether the journalist was named and day of the week.

Outcome measures

A validated quality assessment tool was used to assess each article, with a minimum possible score of –12 and a maximum score of 17. Newspapers were checked in duplicate for relevant articles. The association of each predictor on article quality score was analysed adjusting for remaining predictors. A logistic regression model was implemented with quality score as the binary outcome, categorised as poor (score less than zero) or satisfactory (score of zero or more).

Results

Over 6 weeks, 141 nutrition articles were included across the five newspapers. The median quality score was 2 (IQR –2–6), and 44 (31%) articles were poor quality. There was no substantial variation in quality of reporting between newspapers once other factors such as anonymous publishing, health outcome, aspect of diet covered and day of the week were taken into account. Particularly low-quality scores were obtained for anonymously published articles with no named journalist, articles that focused on obesity and articles that reported on high fat and processed foods.

Conclusions

The general public are regularly exposed to poor quality information in newspapers about what to eat to promote health, particularly articles reporting on obesity. Journalists, researchers, university press officers and scientific journals need to work together more closely to ensure clear, consistent nutrition messages are communicated to the public in an engaging way.

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