Premium
Media Frames across Stages of Health Crisis: A Crisis Management Approach to News Coverage of Flu Pandemic
Author(s) -
Pan PoLin,
Meng Juan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of contingencies and crisis management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.007
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5973
pISSN - 0966-0879
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5973.12105
Subject(s) - crisis management , framing (construction) , crisis communication , pandemic , government (linguistics) , public relations , political science , politics , news media , public health , crisis response , covid-19 , medicine , disease , law , geography , infectious disease (medical specialty) , nursing , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , pathology
Dividing a crisis management process into three stages, this study examined news coverage of swine flu crisis in terms of news frames, mortality exemplars, vaccine problems, evaluation approaches to risk magnitudes and news sources. Results revealed that various framing strategies were used in news media at different stages of the flu crisis. The frames of health risk, societal problems, political/legal issues and prevention/health education were mostly used at the pre‐crisis stage, while the medical/scientific frame was regularly utilized at the post‐crisis stage to highlight medical treatment and scientific research. The evaluation approaches were also employed differently. The qualitative approach was mostly used at the pre‐crisis stage, while the quantitative and statistical approaches were applied frequently at the post‐crisis stage. Health professionals were widely cited as news sources at each stage to increase public awareness of crisis severity, and government officials and politicians repeatedly appeared to function strategically toward the achievement of public‐institution effectiveness at the pre‐crisis stage.