Media Coverage of Public Health Epidemics: Linking Framing and Issue Attention Cycle Toward an Integrated Theory of Print News Coverage of Epidemics

Using framing and issue attention cycle as theoretical frameworks, this study examined how print media frame public health epidemics, such as mad cow disease, West Nile virus, and avian flu. We found that “action” and “consequence” were the two frames journalists employed consistently to construct stories about epidemics in the New York Times, the newspaper used for this case study. The prominence of other frames varied with diseases. We also found different attention cycle patterns for each disease. Coverage of public health epidemics was highly event based, with increased news coverage corresponding to important events such as newly identified cases and governmental actions. We found that media concerns and journalists' narrative considerations regarding epidemics did change across different phases of development and across diseases. This suggests that journalists emphasize different narrative considerations at different stages of the issue development cycle, based on the specificity of each disease.