Media Presentation Of Diseases In Vulnerable Groups

Heat Stroke has the characteristics of high risk,difficult to cure,obvious occupational bias and so on.It occurs very frequently in outdoor manual workers in summer,which is a typical disease of vulnerable groups.In this paper,content analysis is adopted to investigate the reports on Heat Stroke by five mainstream media,including Beijing News,Southern Metropolis Daily,Thepaper.cn,Labor Daily,and Health News,so as to explore the construction mode and influencing factors of media’s representation of diseases of vulnerable groups,and to critically reflect on the functional role of media.The study found that the Heat Stroke reports of five Chinese media mainly showed the following characteristics: First,from the characteristics of the reports,the topics of the reports were widely distributed but mainly focused on disease prevention and control and career security;the sources of the news were extensive but the official information sources dominated overwhelmingly;the reporting genres were rich and all of them focused on disease science popularization.Secondly,in terms of patient image,news issues in industrial,service and urban areas are reported much more frequently than those in agricultural and rural areas,and the media construct differentiated media images of "devotees" and "vulnerable victims" for patients of different professions.Thirdly,in terms of the application of the reporting framework,the five media all highlight the orientation of medical care and humanistic care.Except Health News and Beijing News,which focus on the objective attribution of "weather-medical treatment",the other three media all present the extensive influence of cultural identity,economic level,social power and other factors on Heat Stroke in a balanced way.Fourthly,in terms of reporting quality,The Paper and Southern Metropolis Daily,two well-known market-oriented media,have the best news reporting quality,while Labor Daily and Health News,two professional and industry media,are in the middle.Beijing News,due to its limited attention to this topic due to regional issues,has the lowest score in the news quality measurement.Fifth,in terms of the cognition of netizens,there are not only the appeal for the care of the bottom,but also the call for a sound career security mechanism,as well as some angry emotions.On the whole,the five media play the dual roles of "objective communicator" and "constructive binder" when reporting on februarine diseases.They not only disseminate health information objectively based on the disease reality,but also adopt differentiated reporting strategies for different occupations and topics.At the same time,these media focus on highlighting the difficult life of vulnerable groups and social situations of hardship,so as to construct a triple image overlapping media image of vulnerable groups’ diseases.