Thesis (BA Communication Arts) -- University of the Philippines Mindanao, June 2015

During a crisis like disease epidemics, the primary vehicle for communication is the media, specifically, an online news. In theory, news media should report and analyze events while acting as an unbiased conduit of information, however, this is not reality. New media content is also understood to be a product of a number of antecedent conditions or processes that are responsible for its construction. In itself, the media is also a tool for social construction of meanings. Presently, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa had become a central focus of media attention and was by far, the largest most complex and most severe?acute public health emergency seen in modern times. There have been more cases and deaths in this outbreak than all others combined. Ebola was also trans-national health risk. However, the media stories of the ebola outbreak were hypothesized to take a different faces and interesting turns that may have important implications to risk reporting given that online media public affairs agency have offered a widely accessible, speedy and trans-border travel of news to their audience. If diseases can be easily spread, so does news about them. Grounded on a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis, 145 randomly selected online news articles were analyzed using Moscovici?s Social Representation Theory to identify the representations of Ebola outbreak in online news media. Results show that the ebola outbreak was mainly represented in reference to magnitude, physical manifestation, scientific mystery, infectious nature, medical epidemic, use of media templates, emotions, economic nature, and story templates (in the form of movie templates and character templates). Furthermore, the study also identified different issues of representations. On one hand Ebola was represented as a frightening threat with few instances of reassurance while simultaneously anchored to othering. Ebola was a disease of the poor and posed only hypothetical threat to the western public. Narrative template was also used as a mapping mechanism to make the unfamiliar disease familiar. Articles also lacked cultural discourse and understanding on local?s perspective in terms of the perceptions, beliefs, and understanding of what constitutes health and health care. The results pose important implication on risk reporting and public risk perceptions in this subject.