Lessons learned through the analysis of public responses towards the release of governmental information during the SARS epidemic in HongKong

Abstract

The risk perception as presented by the media is important because it is usually through the

media that the general population first receives information about an important event or crisis. The

unique position of the media comes with a responsibility to provide a ‘communication bridge’

between the government and the general population. However the editorial choices determining the

appropriateness of source, amount, and type of information conveyed to the public during a crisis is

influenced by the contextual environment. The issue attention framework proposed by Downs was

used to explore the possible links between the trajectory of a crisis and the media response may shed

some light on the populations perception of risk during a crisis (the Hong Kong SARS epidemic in

2003) in which WiseNews was used to search the grey literature. The articles identified were

classified into 4 categories: incidence, public health information, economy, and sensationalism by

date of publication. These categories were then plotted on the Hong Kong hospital admissions and

deaths epidemic curves. The study explored the potential link between key events during the Hong

Kong SARS epidemic and the specific content of the medial publications.