How the relationship between public health information officers and journalists can affect media agenda-building : a coorientational approach

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] The purpose of this study is three-fold. The first purpose is to investigate how public health information officers perceive health journalists in terms of trust and how that trust is associated with their perception of media agenda-building. The second is to examine how evaluations of their health advocacy and health expertise can affect media agenda-building perception. The third is to examine the effect of different conditions of press releases on media agenda-building perception. The conditions had high versus low medical jargon usage. All three goals were approached with a coorientation model; therefore, how much public health information officers and health journalists agreed on trust and media agenda-building perception was examined and the levels of agreement were used as independent variables in the study. From a survey with 102 public health information officers, this study found that the trust between public health information officers and health journalists was explained by consistency dimension the most followed by hostility, competence, discreetness, receptivity, and availability dimensions. The expectations on six different dimensions of trust did not predict their perceived level of media agenda-building but predicted their estimation of health journalists' media agenda-building perception. The consistency dimension of trust was a strong predictor.