Newspaper coverage about the smoking ban in the hospitality industry: A content analysis.

In the Netherlands relatively few people support the hospitality industry smoking ban. Possibly this is due to the way the media covered the smoking ban. A content analysis of 1,041 articles in six Dutch newspapers showed that when there were economic aspects of the ban in the newspaper articles, the articles were mostly negative towards the smoking ban (62% negative, 29% positive, 9% mixed or neutral). The same was true when the newspaper articles dealt with resistance against the ban (69% negative, 26% positive, 5% mixed). When there were health aspects in the articles, the articles were equally often positive as negative (42% positive, 43% negative, 15% mixed or neutral). Although the smoking ban was implemented to protect hospitality workers from the health damage of passive smoking, economic aspects (59%) and the resistance against the ban (46%) appeared more often in the newspapers than health aspects (22%).