Assessing Newspaper Preparedness for Public Health Emergencies

Abstract

This study examines newspapers' preparedness for public health emergencies and seeks to explain why some newspapers are better prepared than others. Findings from a regional survey of newspaper managers showed that few newspapers have crisis plans, and few have sufficiently trained or specialized staff for public health coverage. A model predicting level of preparedness received mixed support. As expected, organizational preparedness and professional orientation had significant effects on level of staff preparedness, but environmental factors such as level of toxins in the community and the degree of pluralism in the community's power structure failed to predict.Journalists are critical players in communicating information about health risk to the public. In the event of a public health emergency, there is an unusually high need for information, and the mass media are generally best able to meet this need.' Most adults in the United States, for example, first learned of the September 11,2001, attacks via the mass media.* The anthrax outbreak in fall 2001, the emergence of SARS in 2003, and health risks from Hurricane Katrina were all covered prominently in news outlets around the However, news reports of bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases have been faulted for inaccurate, incomplete, and sensational coverage that may contribute to public misunderstanding of risks: public panic, and even loss of life.5Research suggests media organizations are unprepared to cover these kinds of events in part because their journalists lack sufficient expertise in science and medicine? In the last few years, newsroom budgets for training have been slashed, and with resources stretched thin, time off for training is a luxury few newsrooms can a f f~r d .~ Media organizations have also done little planning for community health crises. In a 2004 survey, the Media Security and Reliability Council found that 15% of radio and 47% of television outlets had disaster recovery plans in place, and a much smaller percentage had rehearsed plans.8 No one appears to have examined newspapers' preparedness. This study examines the level of preparedness of newspapers for public health emergencies and seeks to explain why some newspapers are better prepared than others. A model predicting prepared-

Associations between media use and health information-seeking behavior on vaccinations in South Korea

“…When a new infectious disease emerges, an unfamiliar population perceives that disease according to media reports. Uncertainty and anxiety surrounding the issue are often high [ 5 , 6 ]. However, this is not the first experience of such a phenomenon amongst Koreans.…”

Structural Pluralism in Journalism and Media Studies: A Concept Explication and Theory Construction

“…Third, structural pluralism research should examine not only direct and indirect effects (Demers, 1998) but also interaction effects (Griffin & Dunwoody, 1995) with other types of variables, such as media ownership (Griffin & Dunwoody, 1995Tichenor et al, 1973) and organizational complexity (Demers, 1998;Hindman, 1996) at multiple levels (e.g., communities, organizations, and individuals; see Anderson & Lowrey, 2007;Griffin & Dunwoody, 1995;Lowrey et al, 2006). In particular, structural pluralism research should examine the linkage between different units of analyses (see Hindman, 2004;Nah, 2010).…”

“…Scholars have applied the concept of structural pluralism to various subfields of communication, such as journalism and news reporting (e.g., Demers, 1998;Hindman, 1996;Jeffres, Cutietta, Sekerka, & Lee, 2000), science communication (e.g., Dunwoody & Griffin, 1999;Griffin & Dunwoody, 1995, health communication (Viswanath, Steele, & Finnegan, 2006), public relations (e.g., Lowrey, Gower, Evans, & Mackay, 2006), advertising (Demers, 1994b), social movements (McCluskey, Stein, Boyle, & McLeod, 2009;McLeod & Hertog, 1999), and new communication technologies (Armstrong, 2008;Hindman, Ernst, & Richardson, 2001). In addition, scholars have proposed and tested various conceptual and operational definitions of structural pluralism that contain both single and multiple dimensions (see e.g., Jeffres, 2002;Armstrong, 2006).…”

Conflicting Discourses on Wildfire Risk and the Role of Local Media in the Amazonian and Temperate Forests

“…Although local media provide relevant information in the aftermath of disasters (Rausch 2013;Matthews 2017), their potential role in pre-disaster planning is under-exploited (Ewart and McLean 2018). Disaster planning and preparedness has received limited coverage by local newspapers in the United States (Lowrey et al 2006) and Turkish (Tekeli-Yesil et al 2019) contexts, for example. This gap between media coverage of disaster stories and the anticipatory perspective may be explained by the discursive nature of disaster stories.…”