During natural disasters, mass media facilitate the timely provision of accurate information about health risks to the public. This study informs our understanding of such public health discourse utilizing content-analysis of 235 newspaper articles in four major metropolitan newspapers published in the five weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast in August 2005. These data reveal a small and diminishing number of articles included public health information over time, detailed the hurricane impact on affected communities, and used reliable health sources. The implications for future research from a public health and media relations perspective are discussed.
KeywordsHurricane Katrina; newspapers; risk communication; content analysis Communication research is poised to evaluate how news media communicated health messages in the aftermath of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. Although a number of scholars have examined the institutional and cultural responses to Hurricane Katrina (Brabham, 2006; CDC Mold Work Group, 2005;Faux & Kim, 2006;Tiessen, 2006), little research has attended to mediated health information about the 2005 Atlantic hurricanes (Littlefield & Quenette, 2007), or the risks communicated about the region affected by the disasters (Fry, 2006;Vanderford, Nastoff, Telfer, & Bonzo, 2007).How newspapers told the story of the public health threats faced by people in Louisiana and the surrounding gulf region is important to consider. Although many media critics scorned early inaccuracies in reporting during the Katrina crisis (Cole, 2005;Cullen, 2005;Wilkie, 2005), little empirical evidence has been offered regarding the nature and extent of reporting over time (Fry, 2006). Despite the well-documented tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the difficulty public health officials had in disseminating -and media had in obtaining -accurate and timely public health information during the emergency (Vanderford, et al., 2007), there has been no systematic analysis of media reporting on the health risks posed by Katrina and its aftermath. The role of media in providing the public with timely disaster information and health information in time of crisis has been studied extensively. Agenda setting and framing researchers have demonstrated the influence of print media on public opinion in a variety of contexts (Kitzinger & Reilly, 1997;McCombs, 1997;McCombs & Shaw, 1972;Rogers et al., 1997). Communication scholarship demonstrates that media attention after dramatic events functions "to publicize initial interpretations of the event, repeating and enhancing the impact of these interpretations" (Seeger, Sellnow, & Ulmer, 2003, p. 122). Given media's gate-keeping and priority-setting functions, public knowledge is also constrained by the messages made available to the public by media (Cook et al., 1983;McCombs & Shaw, 1972).Studying how media publicize public tragedy is a significant area for communication research. Although media scholars have separately studied news coverage of public health issues (Bloo...
