Spin in Health News: Levels of Trust in Knowledge Diffusion

This chapter focuses on the dynamics of knowledge diffusion with reference to the popularization of medicine and health-related topics in the media. In particular, it analyzes the pragma-linguistic features employed in the discursive construction of specific reporting strategies in the communication of medical results from their original source, in this case scientific medical journals, into new contexts, namely press releases and online newspaper articles. However, this work deals with a specific aspect of news reporting, when the recontextualization of scientific information into different genres, creates what can be referred to as a ‘distortion’ of the discourse (Hilgartner, 1990; Fairclough, 2006), or news reporting with a slant or bias (Entwistle, 1995).