{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0230967","title":"Tuberculosis and foreign-born populations in the United States: A mixed methods pilot study of media reporting and political identification","abstract":"BACKGROUND: Media reporting on communicable diseases has been demonstrated to affect the perception of the public. Communicable disease reporting related to foreign-born persons has not yet been evaluated. OBJECTIVE: Examine how political leaning in the media affects reporting on tuberculosis (TB) in foreign-born persons. METHODS: HealthMap, a digital surveillance platform that aggregates news sources on global infectious diseases, was used. Data was queried for media reports from the U.S. between 2011-2019, containing the term \"TB\" or \"tuberculosis\" and \"foreign born\", \"refugee (s),\" or \"im (migrants).\" Reports were reviewed to exclude duplicates and non-human cases. Each media source was rated using two independent media bias indicators to assess political leaning. Forty-six non-tuberculosis reports were randomly sampled and evaluated as a control. Two independent reviewers performed sentiment analysis on each report. RESULTS: Of 891 TB-associated reports in the US, 46 referenced foreign-born individuals, and were included in this analysis. 60.9% (28) of reports were published in right-leaning news media and 6.5% (3) of reports in left-leaning media, while 39.1% (18) of the control group reports were published in left- leaning media and 10.9% (5) in right-leaning media (p < .001). 43% (20) of all study reports were posted in 2016. Sentiment analysis revealed that right-leaning reports often portrayed foreign-born persons negatively. CONCLUSION: Preliminary data from this pilot suggest that political leaning may affect reporting on TB in US foreign-born populations. Right-leaning news organizations produced the most reports on TB, and the majority of these reports portrayed foreign-born persons negatively. In addition, the control group comprised of non-TB, non-foreign born reports on communicable diseases featured a higher percentage of left-leaning news outlets, suggesting that reporting on TB in foreign-born individuals may be of greater interest to right-leaning outlets. Further investigation both in the U.S. and globally is needed.","journal":"PLoS ONE","year":2020,"id":113605,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9168,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":383336,"name":"Shravanthi M. Seshasayee","orcid":"0000-0002-1692-7121","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":243388,"name":"Maimuna S. Majumder","orcid":"0000-0002-3986-4303","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":535550,"name":"Britta Lassmann","orcid":"0000-0003-0807-9297","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":317236,"name":"Lawrence C. Madoff","orcid":"0000-0003-2589-7777","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":535551,"name":"Emily Cohn","orcid":"0000-0001-6415-519X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":104589,"name":"John S. Brownstein","orcid":"0000-0001-8568-5317","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":317348,"name":"Angel N. Desai","orcid":"0000-0001-8962-9427","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":19,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:13:21.458038Z","pmid":"32315312","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}