‘The voices that I wanted to give a loudspeaker were the locals, like a victim of this crisis and their families or local health workers commenting on their own system. Metaphors of contamination emphasize the viruses’ spread from the ‘developing’ to the ‘developed’ countries, by constructing binary worlds of ‘dark’ and ‘light’ (Haynes, 2002), ‘Third World’ leaking to the ‘First World’ (Abeysinghe, 2016; Wald, 2008), and ‘centers’ being contaminated by ‘peripheries’ (King, 2002). And that’s how journalists need to think through outbreaks and eventually epidemics, separating in their own minds a possible from the probable’. Journalistic practices, including data collection, verifying sources, fact-checking, and writing, were heavily involved in constructing knowledge about the virus. It's not clear how deadly the Wuhan coronavirus will be, but fatality rates are currently lower than both MERS and SARS.

SARS and MERS were largely transmitted inside hospitals, Horby said. Such a journalistic routine resonates with Chan’s (2016) theorization of ‘media templates’, which demonstrates how past events become framing devices that usher in single, primary meanings for explaining current events. So pitching stories and getting the money to do them is quite challenging. What challenges do journalists face when dealing with emerging infectious disease outbreaks, which are at first far away but then affect, or have the potential to affect their own country and people? These seven journalists mentioned that they had more agency in shaping their stories without a domestic angle due to their companies’ diverse readerships. "It is a significant concern, globally," Ferguson says, noting that we don't fully understand the severity.

Despite identifying the disease posing a threat to their respective countries as of major news value in covering outbreaks, journalists were critically aware and concerned about ethnocentric media narratives and representations of global infectious disease. The implication of such media templates is the marginalization of different possible frames, which can reduce the number of interpretations of an upcoming social risk (Chan, 2016). The preparation efforts reported internationally were generally consistent in strategy and intervention. Despite such a call for collaborative action, many state leaders chose to side with extreme nationalism during the height of the pandemic, as we have witnessed numerous countries shutting down their borders (Brumfiel and Wilburn, 2020) and banning the exports of essential medical supplies (Dahinten and Wabl, 2020; Guarascio, 2020).

Emergency nurses' personal preparedness was influenced by the emotional readiness, their willingness to care for people at risk of Ebola, and the provision of psychological support. Did China use Hollywood movies in military propaganda clip?

This quote reflects the journalist’s deliberate intentions to shift the focus to the outbreaks’ epicenters and shape the event in terms of a global concern rather than that of the US. However, journalists also acknowledged that this was not an easy task. Such a finding complicates the analysis presented in the previous section, which shows that infectious disease outbreaks became newsworthy when they were framed with parochial concerns. How journalists balance the interests of their local audience with the interconnected, interdependent aspects of these global events is the central question of this article. You may be able to reduce your risk of infection by avoiding people who are sick. In the case of the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic, American and British journalists almost universally answered that the epidemic became an international news story when there was a confirmed case in a Western individual. Phrases such as ‘germs do not recognize borders’, are referred to as ‘the great cliché[s] of international infectious disease control’ (Fidler, 2003) as they signify the porousness of state borders. Although these studies provide invaluable insight into the production of health news, I present a slightly different question: how do journalists balance the domestic interests of their audiences with the interconnected, shared aspects of global health crises? In this regard, coverage of the outbreak became a space where domestic political issues, such as party politics and government policies, were played out while the wider global context largely remained invisible.