Covering the Anthrax Scare in Washington
by Frank Comer
On October 15, 2001 the office of Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle
(D-S.D.) received a letter containing the Anthrax bacterium. While not
the first Anthrax letter to be sent via the mail, it was responsible for
a large and diverse response in the journalism community. This also placed
the Emergency Management community in the front pages of the American media.
Articles pertaining to the Anthrax threat and the subsequent investigation
were saturating the media for months following the incident.
The Washington Post, from October 15th through December 1st, published
close to 160 articles discussing the Anthrax matter in Washington DC or
with Senator Daschle's office directly. As is shown here, not only is the
content of the article important, but so is the physical location within
the paper (and how it is presented)
These articles varied in focus but could be summarized into 10 general
areas of interest. These areas were:
- Communications - information pertaining to the distribution
of public information and
public relations as well as the distribution of political
messages
- Disease Information - information pertaining to the Anthrax disease
itself
- Editorial - Op/Ed or editorial based information
- Emotional Response - articles covering the different way people reacted
to the situation
- Event - information about the causation event, how the situation
was created
- Investigation - information pertaining to the activities surrounding
the investigational mode
of the response
- Medical Response - information covering the medical community's response
and action to
the situation
- Operational Response - articles involving the direct response to
the situation and the effort
to prevent it from worsening
- Recovery - information pertaining to the recovery efforts and effort
to return to a
pre-incident state
- Response (other) - covers responses that are not directly related
to the situation itself but
are secondary affects of it. Example would be an agency
changing the way it preformed
a task in response to the incident.
Reviewing the breakdown of these classifications (see Figure 1) it becomes
clear that the majority of articles were focused on the investigation and
communications efforts.
Figure 1
Looking at the information a little differently one can see that while
the Washington Post published more articles on the investigation and communications,
they apparently put more emphasis on the investigation and response (other)
issues by virtue of location within the paper (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 (note: the "Metro" section generally covers regional information
and the "Style" section covers culture, arts, letters etc.)
Looking further into the front section ("A" section), articles pertaining
to the investigation dominated the front page while all others were relegated
to the back pages. (see Figure 3)
When analyzed over time the paper tended to publish fewer and fewer
articles on the front page, especially articles not related to the investigation,
(see Figure 4)
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