Abstract
Objective: This study was conducted to explore what media exactly do when disease is emerging and furthermore, to infer the role and the responsibility that media should play. Method: A content analysis with 0.81 inter-rater reliability was adopted to categorize SARS-related events shown on the three major newspapers in 117 days, dated from March 13th (the date before the first probable case of SARS in Taiwan was identified) to July 7th (the date after Taiwan was removed from the list of SARS-affected countries by the bulletin of World Health Organization), 2003. Results: There were totally 8923 SARS events related news found in the observed newspapers during the study period. When the epidemic situation is more serious, the media will also lay out more coverage on reporting the related contents. In the reporting contents, the three most influential newspapers in Taiwan mainly emphasized the impact dimension (34.27%). Only 2.16% of the coverage was on the topic of health communication and prevention education. Overall, the opinions of general public are the primary sources of news (46.57%). Health authority was not the main and typical sources information of the press (9.42%). Conclusion: Media is a double-edged sword in the communicable disease control. We suggest that the health authority should take advantage of media to transmit message rapidly to convey related information to public.
Highlights
The opinions of general public are the primary sources of news (46.57%), followed by foreign news reports (15.02%), and central ministries (14.71%)
The media is a major source from which people perceive risk in the initial stage, it plays an important role in pandemics events [31]
The study results suggest that the educational function of the media needs to be strengthened, especially in public health issue
Summary
A content analysis was conducted to evaluate how the SARS event is displayed in the newspaper. Content analysis has been defined as a objective, systematic, and quantitative technique for compressing many words of texts into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding [15]-[17]. Newspapers were chosen in the study as materials due to their characteristics of depth, comprehensiveness, and they accommodate different voices and opinions. Newspapers provide sufficient and traceable study materials. According to a survey conducted by AC Nielsen, there are three leading newspapers in Taiwan [19]: the China Post, the United Daily News, and Liberty Times, which were chosen in the study. For the study’s purpose, each newspaper excluded the local news page, the ad page, the entertainment page, and the sports page layout
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