The Changing Quality of Epidemic News Reporting--Institutional Isomorphism and Professionalism

• In Event: 579 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. News

Abstract

The newspaper industry has undergone drastic changes over the past decades. Competitive pressure and decline in readership and advertising revenue brought about large-scale cutbacks in newsroom workforce, leading to concerns that these cutbacks would compromise the quality of news reporting. Decline in the quality of news reporting can lead to a less informed public, potentially hampering effective response in times of crisis. This paper sets out to measure the changing quality of epidemic news reporting during the initial outbreak by focusing on the amount of research conducted for such reporting. Changes in the quality of this crucial news category serve as a barometer of whether newspaper’s main public mission has been compromised due to staff cutbacks. We document the change by studying the coverage in the 1980s on AIDS, in the 1990s after competitive pressure from USA Today on West Nile Virus, and in 2009 after severe newsroom cutback began on H1N1 Swine Flu, by using a random sample of articles from three large, top-ranked, national papers with varying levels of newsroom cutbacks (LA Times, NY Times, and Wall Street Journal). We find that the quality of news reporting has indeed been declining between the 1980s and late 2000s. Our data does not show that the level of newsroom cutbacks correlates with the degree of decline in the quality of news reporting. We suspect institutional isomorphism and journalists’ attempt to maintain professional standard have kept the quality of epidemic news reporting similar among these three elite newspapers.

Author

• Rebecca S.K. Li, The College of New Jersey