Newspaper Coverage of Cancer Prevention: Multilevel Evidence for Knowledge Gap Effects.

Prior research on knowledge gap effects, in health as well as in other domains, has focused largely on assessing individual-level differences in exposure to news based on self-report of media use. Inherent inferential limitations of this approach are addressed by testing the hypothesis that the relationship between education and cancer prevention knowledge will be moderated by regional differences in U.S. news coverage of cancer prevention. The study also tests, using these methods, findings by Kwak (1999) suggesting that the importance of attention to relevant news in predicting knowledge decreases as information available in the news increases. Using a representative national sample of newspaper coverage to assess regional differences in cancer prevention coverage, a representative national probability sample to assess respondent education and cancer prevention knowledge, and multilevel analyses of the relationship between regional coverage differences and knowledge of persons in those regions, support is found for both of these propositions.