An Analysis On Government Press Release Strategies Towards Public Health Emergencies

In2003, we Chinese people suffered and survived from "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" which is now known as SARS successfully The root cause of the trust crisis which results from SARS mainly lies in government’s news blackout in the very beginning of the public opinion. After that, public health emergency starts to draw the attention of government, mass media, and the public. Years between2004and2013witnessed several influential public health emergencies, during which the approaches and strategies of government news release are becoming more and more mature and the news release mechanism is established.Public health emergency is a matter of public health and safety, to which the scholars attach great importance during their research. In the second chapter, this dissertation will provide the definition and evolution history of public health emergency and government news release, and will also elaborate on the importance and necessity of government news release towards public health emergency. Whereafter, this dissertation takes the388news release held by the National Health and Family Planning Commission of People’s Republic of China (NHFPC)from2004to2013as examples and investigates the government news release overviews and effects under general and crisis situation separately. In the mean time, this dissertation also gives an analysis on an outburst epidemic situation and the outbreaks of NHFPC from2004-2013, and draws a conclusion that the news release methods are changing and the strategies are more and more mature.And then comes the case study part. This dissertation starts its investigation from the general information of H7N9including its information spreading characteristics and effects, analyzes and refines the strategies, channels and methods in which government releases news. At last, this dissertation also provides several suggestions on further improvement of strategies of government news release towards public health emergencies, such as paying more attention to the timing in order to erase the information vacuum, taking advantage of sentimental structure in order to release news step by step, making the most of mass media in order to release news via various channels, being sincere and honest to mass media and avoiding releasing official news, and also improving the relevancy of questions and answers in QA session. In this way, the government agenda, mass media agenda and public agenda can be positively interacted, so that the public health affairs can be fairly solved and social stability and harmony can be well maintained.