Defining health risk by media template: Hong Kong’s news discourse of the Swine Flu pandemic

Abstract

In the risk society that has resulted from modernization, power rests with those who define risks. In the midst of uncertainties and controversies surrounding unpredictable risks, the news value of objectivity becomes a key justification for news organizations and journalists narrating speculation of social risks in news discourses. I shed light on the theorization of ‘media template’, and construct a three-step model to examine how highly unknown social risks are constructed as social facts in the process of news-making. News discourse first represents a simplified and distorted ‘lesson learnt’ from a past exemplary event of concerned social risk. Second, it marginalizes meanings other than those constructed by that exemplar. Last, the news discourse ‘repairs’ its narration when contradictory evidence emerges. I explicate the model by demonstrating how Hong Kong’s news discourse about the Swine Flu pandemic in 2009 drew upon the exemplar of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic in 2003. I also discuss the implications of media template to news construction of social risks with reference to the theoretical underpinnings of risk society.