Sandra Marinho

A media pandemic: Influenza A in Portuguese newspapers

Abstract On April 2009, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic alert as a consequence of the appearance of a new influenza virus, named ‘Influenza A, H1N1’. In Portugal, media coverage on this disease was intense. However, as the number of deaths within Influenza A patients turned out to be much lower than the foreseen statistics of national authorities, the hypothesis of a ‘media pandemic’ was suggested by national opinion makers. Looking for a better understanding of the phenomenon, we conducted a study on media coverage and news sources on Influenza A in Portugal. The study of news sources on health issues is a way of understanding health information and it has been a neglected area on Health Communication. This investigation stood on the examination of 655 articles of three national newspapers, with distinct editorial criteria. The analysis considered six variables: number of sources, geographic location, genre, identification, status, and medical expertise. This task followed a quantitative methodology. The findings confirmed previous noticed trends on health information research: the power of official sources, the complexity of access to medical sources, and the lasting misunderstandings between journalists and the medical community.

Escherichia coli: A disease in the news through speeches of uncertainty and contradiction

Abstract In May 2011 there was a rare outbreak of E. coli in Germany, and its origin was not clear. Through several weeks, official sources came forward with probable explanations that were contradicted by the following events. Through that time, media kept contradicting themselves, promoting uncertainty and making vegetables’ consumption decrease drastically. This article studies the Portuguese media coverage of this outbreak, looking into understanding the news coverage processes and also sources journalists talked to. Our study is based on news from Público, Jornal de Notícias and Expresso, three Portuguese newspapers with different editorial criteria and periodicity. Our corpus has 52 articles and there are 163 news sources quoted.