Pandemics And The Media

Offering a comprehensive analysis of mediated representations of global pandemics, this book engages with the construction, management, and classification of difference in the global context of a pandemic, to address what it means - culturally, politically, and economically - to live in an infected, diseased body. Marina Levina argues that mediated representations are essential in translating and making sense of difference as a category of subjectivity and as a mode of organizing and distributing change. Using textual analysis of media texts on pandemics and disease, she illustrates how they represent a larger mediascape that drafts stories of global instabilities and global health. Levina explains how the stories we tell about disease matter; that the media is instrumental in constructing and disseminating these stories; and that mediated narratives of pandemics are rooted in global flows of policies, commerce, and populations. Pandemics are, by definition, global crises.

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media's adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.

Covid-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Responses is one of the first books uniting an international team of scholars to investigate how media address critical social, political, and health issues connected to the 2020-21 COVID-19 outbreak. The book evaluates unique civic challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities for media worldwide, exploring pandemic social norms that media promote or discourage, and how media serve as instruments of social control and resistance, or of cooperation and representation. These chapters raise significant questions about the roles mainstream or citizen journalists or netizens play or ought to play, enlightening audiences successfully about scientific information on COVID-19 in a pandemic that magnifies social inequality and unequal access to health care, challenging popular beliefs about health and disease prevention and the role of government while the entire world pays close attention. This book will be of interest to students and faculty of communication studies and journalism, departments of public health, sociology, and social marketing.

This topical volume illuminates ethical issues brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a broad range of case studies from different regions, it provides insights into the multiple and complex ways in which the pandemic has shaped media ethics. The chapters employ a wide range of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to dissect enduring and emerging ethical questions during the pandemic, providing lucid accounts of axiological dimensions in pandemic discourses, ethics of emotional mood, ethical challenges and dilemmas in news reporting, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation and Othering. While the case studies in this book are unique, the authors have extrapolated common strands from their analysis of ethical issues applicable to any other country or region during the pandemic, contributing unique perspectives on how media ethics are circumscribed by global health pandemics. The book will appeal to researchers, academics and practitioners at all levels in the fields of media studies, journalism, communication, media sociology and public health, as well as general readers and policymakers who are keen to learn more about how global health crises illuminate critical ethical issues confronting the media.

This truly interdisciplinary volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore changes in the significance of media and communication in the era of pandemic. The book answers two interrelated questions: how media and communication reality changed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how media and communication were effectively studied during this time. The book presents changes in media and communication in three areas: media production, media content, and media usage contexts. It then describes the theoretical and practical, methodological, technical, organizational, and ethical challenges in conducting research in circumstances of sudden change in research conditions, emergency situations and developing crises. Drawing on various theoretical studies and empirical research, the volume illustrates the principles and results of applying diverse research methods to the changing role of media in a pandemic and offers good practices and guidance to address the problems in implementing research projects in a time of sudden difficulties and challenges. This diverse and interdisciplinary book will be of significance to scholars and researchers in media studies, communication studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003232049-5/ecological-approach-fausto-colombo?context=ubx&refId=aa5bc500-bb40-4ccb-879b-d5c8562efa67

Populism is on the rise across the globe. Authoritarian populist leaders have taken over and solidified their control over many countries. Their power has been cemented during the global coronavirus pandemic, though perhaps the defeat of populist-in-chief Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election (despite his continuing protestations to the contrary) has seen the start of the waning of this phenomenon? In the UK Brexit is 'done'; Britain is firmly out of the EU; Covid is vaccinated against; and Boris Johnson has a huge parliamentary majority and, despite never-ending problems, of his own and others' making, his grip on power with a parliamentary majority of more than 80, still seems secure. Meanwhile culture wars continue to rage. How has media, worldwide, contributed, fulled or fought this populism. Cheerleaders? Critics? Supplicants? This book examines those questions in 360 degrees with a distinguished cast of authors from journalism and academia.

This truly interdisciplinary volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore changes in the significance of media and communication in the era of pandemic. The book answers two interrelated questions: how media and communication reality changed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how media and communication were effectively studied during this time. The book presents changes in media and communication in three areas: media production, media content, and media usage contexts. It then describes the theoretical and practical, methodological, technical, organizational, and ethical challenges in conducting research in circumstances of sudden change in research conditions, emergency situations and developing crises. Drawing on various theoretical studies and empirical research, the volume illustrates the principles and results of applying diverse research methods to the changing role of media in a pandemic and offers good practices and guidance to address the problems in implementing research projects in a time of sudden difficulties and challenges. This diverse and interdisciplinary book will be of significance to scholars and researchers in media studies, communication studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

This edited collection provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary critique of the acts of public communication disseminated during a major global crisis. Encompassing contributions from academics working in the fields of politics, environmentalism, citizens’ rights, state theory, cultural studies, journalism, and discourse/rhetoric, the book offers an original insight into the relationship between the various social forces that contributed to the ‘Covid narrative’. The subjects analysed here include: the performance of the ‘mainstream’ media, the quality of political ‘messaging’ and argumentation, the securitised state and racism in Brazil, the growth of ‘catastrophic management’ in UK universities, emergent journalistic practices in South Africa, homelessness and punitive dispossession, the pandemic and the history of eugenics, and the Chinese media’s attempt to disguise discriminatory practices. This is one of the first comparative studies of the various rationales offered for state/corporate intervention in public life. Delving beneath established political tropes and state rhetoric, it identifies the power relations exposed by an event that was described as unprecedented and unique, but was in fact comparable to other major global disruptions. As governments insisted on distinguishing their own propaganda from unregulated disinformation, their increasingly sceptical ‘publics’ pursued their own idiosyncratic solutions to the crisis, while the apparent sacrifice of a host of citizens – from the most dedicated to the most vulnerable – suggested that inequality and exploitation remained at the heart of the social order. Power, Media, and the Covid-19 Pandemic is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in media, communication and journalism studies, politics, environmental sciences, critical discourse analysis, cultural studies, and the sociology of health.