Breast Cancer Coverage In Kenyan Newspapers: Investigating A Prevention Agenda.

The media is a key avenue through which the general public receives health information. In the wake of the growing breast cancer pandemic in Kenya, it is crucial to understand the extent of the newspaper coverage after passing of the cancer legislation in Kenya in 2012. The purpose of this research was to investigate the extent of coverage of breast cancer in view of the cancer control continuum in two leading Kenyan newspapers between 2013 and 2016 and determine the existence of a prevention agenda. Informed by the agenda-setting theory, the study sought to establish (a) the distribution of published article genres (news, feature and opinion) that discussed the status of the breast cancer issue in the two sampled newspapers, the Daily Nation and The Standard (selection), (b) the distribution of published breast cancer articles (month, year) in the two publications newspapers between 2013-2016 (salience), and (c) the frequencies of the five elements of the cancer control continuum (detection, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship and prevention) with special attention to prevention in breast cancer coverage contained in the two newspapers (agenda). The study employed the content analysis research design to study 340 articles that mentioned breast cancer. The articles were selected using the simple random sampling technique. Cohen’s Kappa inter-coder reliability coefficient of.82 was observed, seen as acceptable. Findings indicate that the Daily Nation had significantly more articles (247 or 73%) on breast cancer than the Standard (93 or 27%). The year with the lowest number of articles (76) was 2013 while 2015 had the highest (101). Moreover, October (cancer awareness month) had the highest number of articles (84 or 24.71%) and April the lowest (14 or 4.12%) in the four years studied (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016). The study established that the coverage agenda was inclined towards treatment as it had the highest number of occurrences (476 or 28% mentions), followed by diagnosis (462 or 27% occurrence), detection (392 or 23% mentions), prevention (209 or 12% occurrence) and the lowest coverage was on survivorship (161 or 9% occurrences). The study therefore established an insufficiency of coverage of prevention messaging about breast cancer. Overall, both papers gave secondary prevention more coverage (170 or 57.43%) than primary prevention. The Standard had more primary prevention emphasis (68 mentions) than the Daily Nation (58 mentions). Finally, coverage received moderate salience as most articles fell under the feature genre (239 or 70% of the articles), followed by news genre (79 or 23% of the articles), and the least used genre was opinion genre (22 or 6%). The study offers some recommendations to the media, health practitioners and campaign developers. The two newspapers under consideration need to increase their coverage of the all the elements of the cancer control continuum throughout the year not only when it is considered newsworthy to provide coverage during the breast cancer awareness month of October. Particular attention should be given to the primary prevention of breast cancer over its treatment in order to contribute to the reduction of the growing incidence of the disease in the larger unaffected but at-risk population. Conversation needs to give prominence to the prevention of breast cancer in other forms of mass media, alternative media and community platforms. This study contributes to media agenda-setting knowledge that Kenyan newspapers have are yet to fully embrace the cancer prevention agenda. Future studies may examine whether a similar breast cancer coverage thread runs in other types of Kenyan media. Further research may assess the impact of breast cancer preventive content found in newspapers on various target audiences.