Political+Agenda+in+Medical+Journalism

Chris Murphy This article, instead of focusing on medical propaganda distributed through advertising, centers around medical propaganda used by government with China as the primary example. To specify further who the propaganda originates from, the article cites the People’s Daily (a popular, communist-sympathizing, Chinese newspaper) to show how Chinese media uses medical propaganda to manipulate its people. Starting with the importance of media in health coverage, the article begins to list how viewers rely on the media during an epidemic. The goal of media in this case is to provide a moral overtone, educate the public on the disease and present scientific findings. It is important for these reports to be accurate because researchers go to them first for their findings; if the articles are corrupt, then the research published as a function of the articles will be useless. The article then explains how frequently the People’s Daily reported on SARS during the 4 month period of its epidemic and how the newspaper organized its articles online for researchers. The trends showed a major change in frequency of SARS-related articles being published, with notable data being the highest happening in May and a sharp decline in publishing towards the end. The article then touches on the paper’s trends in article organization. As the epidemic progressed, the People’s Daily began to organize more articles under National Values and Attribution to Government than it did Education and Medical Prevention. The article then discusses the obvious implement of political agenda in medical journalism, thus making it propaganda.

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