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News coverage of tobacco issues influences both individual behavior change and policy progression. Thus, media advocacy is increasingly recognized as important for promoting public health. Letters to the editor (LTE) are a basic form of media advocacy, serving to demonstrate community sentiment on a given issue. Such letters are yet to receive systematic analytic consideration. The authors conducted an ethnographic content analysis of LTE on tobacco issues from a sample of 11 Australian daily newspapers over a 3-year period (2001 to 2003, N = 361). They argue that letters are artifacts of active engagement in a public debate and note that various stakeholders adopt similar strategies to pursue their objectives. They illustrate how identifying personal and collective identities is crucial in the assertion of legitimacy of voice in LTEs. Better understanding is needed of both the particular issues that spark public engagement, and the salient rhetoric employed by advocates of disparate positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose. To characterize the presence of advocacy groups in media coverage about tobacco issues. Design. A content analysis of tobacco-related newspaper articles. Setting. Australia. Sample. All 12 national and state capital daily newspapers published in Australia between 2004 and 2007. Measures. We coded each article for explicit mentions of any of 16 major national or state tobacco control advocacy groups; for the article type, prominence, and topic; for the tone of the event; and for the author's opinion. Analysis. A series of 2 × 2 x² analyses assessed the extent to which advocacy groups were more or less likely to be mentioned in articles of each type, prominence, topic, event impact, and opinion orientation. Results. Of the 4387 tobacco-related articles published over this period, 22% mentioned an advocacy group. There was a greater-than-expected proportion of advocacy groups mentioned in news articles with very high prominence (44%; x² [1, N = 3118] = 27.4, p < .001), high prominence (34%; x² [1, N = 3118J = 10.9, p < .001), and medium prominence (30%; x² [1, N= 3118] = 7.3, p = .007), and in articles covering events with mixed (30%; x² [1, N = 4387] = 10.0, p = .002) or positive (24%; x² [1, N = 43871 = 26.1, p <.001)implications for tobacco control. Conclusions. Australian tobacco control advocacy groups have a reasonable presence within the news discourse on tobacco control issues and so are likely to contribute to generating and shaping this discourse, particularly in relation to evolving and controversial issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]