Enacting pandemics: How health authorities use the press-and vice versa

Abstract

Pandemics and other public health crises typically attract a great deal of media attention, and some scholars have argued that they are prime examples of "media hypes." That was certainly true of the 2009 pandemic, which in several countries became the biggest news story of that year. But how are pandemics mediated, and why are they mediated in that way? In this chapter, we draw on interviews with public health officials and newspaper editors in Norway, to explore how these parties co-enacted the drama that was the 2009 pandemic. We find that many of the decisions taken by the health authorities were motivated by a particular set of assumptions about how the media works, but at the same time, that the media deny the accuracy of these assumptions