Abstract
Over the past decade, China has witnessed fast-paced technological advancements in the media industry, as well as major shifts in the health agenda portrayed in the media. Therefore, a key starting point when discussing health communication lies in whether media attention and public attention towards health issues are structurally aligned, and to what extent the news media guides public attention. Based on data mined from 73,060 sets of the Baidu Search Index and Media Index on 20 terms covering different types of cancer from 2011 to 2020, the Granger test demonstrates that, in the last decade, public attention and media attention towards cancer in China has gone through two distinct phases. During the first phase, 2011–2015, Chinese news media still held the key in transferring the salience of issues on most cancer types to the public. In the second phase, from 2016–2020, public attention towards cancer has gradually diverged from media coverage, mirroring the imbalance and mismatch between the demand of active public and the supply of cancer information from news media. This study provides an overview of the dynamic transition on cancer issues in China over a ten-year span, along with descriptive results on public and media attention towards specific cancer types.
Highlights
EViews 11.0 was used for the Granger causality test alongside the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test and vector auto regression (VAR) modeling, coupled with SPSS 25.0 for the correlation coefficient and the coefficient of variance (CV) calculations
The Baidu Search Index of the 20 kinds of cancer has maintained a long-term rising trend but in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, declined to levels similar to that of the year 2015, while the Baidu Media Index has been hovering at a low level since a precipitous drop in 2015
Our research begins with how the Chinese media and public have allocated their attention towards different types of cancer in the last ten years, and one of our primary findings is a descriptive overview of the current status
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cancer universally ranks as a leading cause of death and is a crucial barrier to increasing life expectancy [1]. In 2020, the estimated number of new cancer cases was 19.29 million globally, and approximately one out of every four new cancer patients appear in China [2]. This life-threatening and increasingly prevalent disease has been a highly explored topic when it comes to the cross-field of cancer and health-information seeking behavior (HISB)
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