The Content and Language of Newspaper Articles Related to the Official Ban on Smoking in Greece

This study aims to investigate the content and language of newspaper articles referring to the start of the official ban on smoking in Greece in July 2009. Given that smoking in Greece is generally taken to be a social and acceptable habit, despite its undeniable negative impact on health, Greek government launched an extensive anti-smoking campaign. Newspapers played a crucial role in conveying anti-smoking messages and keeping public opinion informed. Having in mind that language as a code expresses and reflects social values and beliefs and news is full of these values, we conducted a survey in order to study the major themes and language devices used in newspaper articles before and after the implementation of the new anti-smoking legislation. Our search yielded 196 articles, which were classified according to their dominant theme into 13 categories. From our analysis, it was concluded that, on the occasion of the ban on smoking, there was full coverage of all the main issues related to tobacco use. Moreover, the language features found varied depending on the identified dominant theme.