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; Minhong Wang

doi:10.3390/ijerph19159588

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

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Aug 4;19(15):9588. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19159588.

Authors

Hua Guo¹, Jiandong Zhang¹, Shihui Feng², Boyin Chen², Minhong Wang^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Business School, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, China.
² Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
³ Department of Educational Information Technology, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China.

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: COVID-19 pandemic; global media; news flow; risk communication; social network analysis.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

COVID-19* / epidemiology
Communication
Emergencies
Humans
Pandemics
SARS-CoV-2
Social Media*

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Grant No. 21YJA870002), Chinese Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. B210207039), General Research Fund from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR Government (No. 17201415), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61977023), and Eastern Scholar Chair Professorship Fund (No. JZ2017005) from Shanghai Municipal Education Commission of China.