A Study On Report About Public Health Emergencies

Public health emergencies are closely related to the health of the public, they also strongly influence the development of the social economy and social stability. As the SARS burst out in 2003 and the Bird-flu event broke out in 2004, we know that the governments, the media and the public have paid more and more attention to the public health emergencies. However, with the impacts of administrative control by the governments and traditional news concepts held by most reporters, media coverings on public health emergencies are far from being good enough. This paper based on studies about reporting case of Bird-flu event and analyses different reports' features from different angle of view. This study indicated that some kind of news concepts and news policies as well as news regulations have dropped behind the practices of news reporting, which restricted news reporting on public health emergencies a lot. Improving Chinese media's coverage on public health emergencies is a complicated process and changing the patterns of reporting to deal with public health emergencies is necessary, so the Chinese government should work out "information exposure law" and "journalism law" as soon as possible to protect the right to know by citizens and right to report by reporters. To consummate the News Spokesman system so as to expand the depth and width of information exposure from government is necessary too. From the perspective of media, the media should take on its social responsibility consciously and make all-round reports on public health emergencies in order to draw the public opinion to a correct direction.