Risk Communication in the Alert Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis of News Flow at National and Global Levels

Hua Guo, Jiandong Zhang, Shihui Feng, Boyin Chen and Minhong Wang
Additional contact information
Hua Guo: Business School, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, China
Jiandong Zhang: Business School, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, China
Shihui Feng: Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Boyin Chen: Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Minhong Wang: Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 15, 1-20

Abstract: This study examined the global media citation network of COVID-19-related news at two stages of the pandemic alert phase, i.e., the national level alert stage and the global level alert stage. The findings reveal that the small-world pattern and scale-free property of media citation networks contributed to the rapid spread of COVID-19-related news around the world. Within the networks, a small number of media outlets from a few countries formed the backbone of the network to control the risk communication; meanwhile, many media of geographical and cultural similarities formed cross-border collaborative cliques in the periphery of the network. When the alert phase escalated from the national level to the global level, the network demonstrated a number of changes. The findings contribute to the understanding of risk communication for international public health emergencies by taking into account the network perspective and evolutionary nature of public health emergencies in analysis.

Keywords: risk communication; news flow; global media; COVID-19 pandemic; social network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/15/9588/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/15/9588/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:15:p:9588-:d:880108

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().