2001  (Volume 27, Number 6, pgs. 708-724)

Readiness to Change: Newspaper Coverage of Tobacco Farming and Diversification

Mark H. Smith, PhD, David G. Altman, PhD, Brad Strunk.

Diversification, like tobacco use prevention and cessation, is an important public health concern. The multi-level patterns of tobacco dependency suggest the need for public health approaches to the "tobacco problem." To understand how newspaper and wire service journalists cover issues involving diversification among tobacco farmers, the authors performed a content analysis of a subset of 100 articles on diversification and tobacco farming. Prochaska and DiClemente's stages-of-change model was applied to the "problem behavior" of tobacco farming. Among news accounts relating to tobacco farmers or tobacco farming, print media accounts gave relatively little attention to the issue of diversification. Farmers in the sample of news accounts were generally cognizant of pressures to diversify away from reliance on tobacco cultivation but were frustrated due to obstacles to diversification, such as limited diversification options and relative absence of infrastructure supports. Community leaders and policy-relevant sources generally supported diversification.