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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Author(s)
Tania Orbe, Katicnina Tituaña, Eric Samson
Full-Text PDF XML 855 Views
DOI:10.17265/2160-6579/2019.05.001
Affiliation(s)
Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador
ABSTRACT
Zika is an infectious disease that emerged as an
epidemic in Latin America in 2015 and arrived in Ecuador at the start of 2016.
This research analyzes the coverage that two national Ecuadorian newspapers
gave to this sanitary emergency. Journals El
Telégrafo and El Universo, the
first one of government domain and the other one of a private company, were
chosen to be studied, and interviews with journalists who reported before,
during and after the epidemic, were conducted. The results showed that: In most
news articles, a single source is handled, preferably the official or
institutional one; that the majority of articles were about the international
situation rather than local or national information; that alarm content is privileged
over the preventive; and finally that the earthquake that hit the Ecuadorian
coast in April 2016 weakened the coverage of Zika, even though the epidemic was
at its outbreak at the time in the country. There is a need for journalists to
be trained to cover these types of emergencies in order to better inform the
people and follow up diseases cycles in order to arrange their own news agenda
and work more on solution approaches.
KEYWORDS
Zika, Ecuador, media coverage, El Telégrafo, El Universo
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