While the persisting issue of women's underrepresentation in political news partly arises from biases in the social reality, journalism plays a crucial role in mediating these biases. This study proposes a multilayered framework of gendered influences in journalistic news production to understand how journalistic factors exacerbate or mitigate women's media representation. Drawing from a mixed-methods design (content analysis, survey, interviews), journalists' own gender emerges as the strongest predictor of gendered representations. Women's underrepresentation is also influenced by professional roles but not by organizations' gender guidelines. We explore how journalists perceive these influences and discuss conceptual and practical implications.

Previous research has mostly ignored that citizens could experience information overload from a single issue extensively covered in the news. Especially when it comes to issues upon which citizens decide directly in a referendum, overload and avoidance would be problematic from a democracy theory perspective. This study investigates overload and avoidance at the issue level based on a three-wave panel survey on a referendum in Switzerland and finds weak information overload at the aggregate level. However, citizens become increasingly overloaded during the period of extensive news coverage which leads to avoidance of news on the issue but not of interpersonal discussions.

This study explores how fact-checkers understand information disorder in Ibero-America, in particular the COVID-19 disinformation. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of the LatamChequea Coronavirus alliance database and in-depth interviews with journalists from the network. Evidence found that one of the most prevalent disinformation topics was the government's restrictive measures, threatening to jeopardize the effectiveness of public health campaigns. This, added to disinformation that eroded the trust in the institutions and the press, and the opacity of governments constituted a political crisis in Ibero-America. Under this scenario, fact-checkers created relevant journalistic collaborations and strategies to fight disinformation in the region.

Based on a study of U.S.-tagged items in a global database of fact-checked statements about the novel coronavirus throughout the first year of the pandemic, this article explores the nature of fact-checkers' "retroactive gatekeeping." This term is introduced here to describe the process of assessing the veracity of information after it has entered the public domain rather than before. Although an overwhelming majority of statements across 16 thematic categories were deemed false and debunked, often repeatedly, misinformation continued to circulate freely and widely.

Networked framing focuses on how the public becomes gatekeepers on social media. To unpack the dynamics of networked framing, we conducted an automated frame analysis to identify the shift of frame structures of government media ( = 12,090) and the public ( = 1.49 million) on Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found a moderate level of frame alignment between government media and the public, with high divergence observed during the pandemic's initial stage. The public challenged government media frames by deploying unique frame functions and creating new frames, but their frame network was fragmented relative to that of government media, which constructed a cohesive network of frames to enhance discursive control.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to inflict damage throughout the world, some minority groups are bearing a disproportionate share of its impacts. We concentrated on one such group, U.S.-dwelling Chinese, who have had to cope with challenges related to acculturation, health, safety, and racism. Recognizing that health information seeking was an essential step in helping maintain and improve health behaviors, we conducted a two-wave longitudinal study ( = 1,284) to examine the various factors predicting U.S.-dwelling Chinese's use of U.S. and Chinese media for COVID-19 information as well as the consequences of their information seeking. Overall, we found that acculturation, accuracy (i.e., information insufficiency) and defense (i.e., conspiratorial beliefs) motivations, trust in media, and perceived information gathering capacity played a key role in explaining information seeking from an intercultural viewpoint, and that the use of U.S. and Chinese media was associated with different health behaviors. These findings contribute to theory and practice in a variety of ways.

This study investigated how exposure to negative and misleading online comments about the COVID-19 vaccination persuasive messages and the ensuing corrective rebuttals of these comments affected people's attitudes and intentions regarding vaccination. An online experiment was performed with 344 adults in the United States. The results showed that rebuttals by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rather than those by social media users, indirectly increased people's willingness to receive the vaccine by reducing their psychological reactance to persuasive messages and their belief in the misinformation contained in the comments. Rebuttals by social media users became more effective in reducing reactance when people initially had stronger pro-vaccination attitudes.

This study investigated the role of breast cancer survivors in a computer-mediated social support (CMSS) group for women with breast cancer. Applying a computer-aided content analytic method, the present study examined the differences in support provision between survivors and newly diagnosed patients. This study further investigated the impacts of survivor-provided social support on psychosocial adjustment of newly diagnosed patients. The results revealed that, compared with newly diagnosed patients, breast cancer survivors provided more emotional and informational support. Receiving emotional support from survivors contributed to an improvement in the quality of life and the depression of patients. The effects of survivor-provided informational support were not significant.

The current study sought to examine the impact of strengthening cigarette pack warnings on attention, message processing, and perceived effectiveness, through a systematic review of longitudinal observational studies. The review included 22 studies (N = 81,824 participants). Strengthened warnings increased attention to warnings, recall of warnings, and thinking about the health risks of smoking. Strengthened warnings also increased several perceived effectiveness outcomes, including perceptions that warnings reduce smoking and motivate quitting. Strengthened cigarette pack warnings achieve their goal of attracting attention and enhancing motivation to act. Strengthening warning policies should be a priority for tobacco control globally.

Using a nationally representative sample, this study examined the relationship between amount of alcohol and tobacco advertising and related news-editorial content. This study found less tobacco and alcohol advertising in newspapers than did previous research and no relationship between coverage and number of advertisements.