Network Agenda Setting Research On Public Health Events In The New Media Environment

Public health scandals happen frequently with the breakup of Shandong vaccine scandal in 2016 and Changsheng Bio-technology vaccine scandal in 2018.How news media affect public perception about the scandals have an influence on the development of public opinion.Communication effect research is a key aspect in the study on public opinion of public health incidents.Network agenda setting theory,which proposed based on the change of media environment and public cognitive structure,aims to affect public cognition by bundling different objects and attributes of the incidents.It can offer enlightenment of improving agenda setting effect of news media in the scandals.Previous research mainly applied content analysis to study media reports from the perspective of communication content,few researches studied the influence of media report on public opinion from the perspective of communication effect.Therefore,taking the Changsheng Bio-technology vaccine scandal as an example,this study attempts to study the media reports and public opinion of public health incident from the perspective of communication effect based on the network agenda setting theory.Related newspaper reports and online media reports are obtained from WiseNews database,and Weibo are crawled by Gooseeker software.Employing social network analysis,the research studies the way of mapping out the agenda network of newspaper,online media,media Weibo and the public,and furthermore validate network agenda setting of various media effect.The results indicate that,firstly,news media tend to report what public health incident is,why and how it happens,however,are ignored.Secondly,the media agenda focuses on the interrelationships among government,public and stock market.As a result,the contradictions of public opinion are leaded to these elements.Thirdly,news media attempt to transfer the agenda network center from safety impact to economic impact.Fourthly,the news media and the public agenda are inconsistent.The salience of safety issue in the public agenda is more prominent than in media agenda.Lastly,different media types can affect the third level of agenda setting effect.On the public health incidents,the traditional media and the online media agenda are not significantly correlated with public agenda.Media Weibo agenda is significantly correlated with public agenda.Based on the findings,this study provides some suggestions about how to deal with public opinion to the media,the public,the government and the relevant enterprise.In addition,the study expands the application of network agenda setting theory in non-western context.