An Analysis Of The Practice Of Public Health Emergency Reporting From The Perspective Of Constructive Journalism

The covid-19 pandemic has not stopped since its outbreak in early 2020.Accompanied by this is the imbalance of the communication ecology brought about by the infodemic.The information environment is full of false and negative reports,which intensifies public anxiety.At the same time,constructive journalism has become the focus of journalism academic community of our country.It emphasizes injecting problem-solving reports into the ocean of negative narratives,so as to promote positive social psychology and positive willingness to act.As active subjects of constructive journalism practice,some British and American media tried to change the reporting style of "negative reports are good reports".The British magazine Positive News and the American magazine Yes! are local media that are good at reporting constructive news.This research tried to conduct a content analysis of 224Covid-19 reports of Positive News and Yes! from March 10 th 2020 to March 10th2021,to explore the constructive characteristics of public health emergencies reports written by the two media.The study found that the two media's reports on the pandemic focused on reporting solutions based on the reported problems to bring a positive impact on the mood of the readers,and mainly reported on the implemented solutions and their achievements.In terms of source selection,most articles introduce solutions from the perspective of the subject of proposing and implementing countermeasures,but lack multiple perspectives.In addition,more than one-third of the reports use backgrounds to improve the context,tell the story of folk individuals who tackle problems,and provide a channel for audiences to participate in problem-solving by setting up hyperlinks,so as to satisfy the audience's positive psychology of realizing personal value.In terms of reporting strategy,Positive News and Yes!'s COVID-19 coverage report reported solutions while sticking to the function of public opinion supervision,supplemented the grand narrative information landscape by reporting individual stories,and actively realized the linkage between online reporting and offline activities.However,these reports also have the problems of objective displacement,lack of full attention to the disadvantaged groups,and single communication techniques.Therefore,this enlightenment that when reporting public health emergencies,Chinese media should not only pay attention to social problems and their solutions during the pandemic,use solution narrative to convey positive emotions,but also pay attention to micro-narrative reports,promote citizen participation,and guide the audience to look at the post-pandemic correctly.It can be said that the current social responsibility of the news media is no longer just to adhere to the "monitoring function",but to connect citizen participation as an "interventionist",perform the "predictive function" as a "predictor" standing in the post-pandemic to have an insight into the future development,so as to realize the transformation of "constructive function".