The Public Face of an Epidemic Risk: Personalization of an Ebola Outbreak in Nordic Media

Abstract

This chapter explores how newspapers in Denmark and Norway both verbally and visually framed and personalized risk and crisis assessments and scenarios following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Our point of departure is media samples from the two Nordic countries in two different periods of the outbreak. We investigate how authorities, non-governmental organizations and victims were used as sources and personalized in the mediated narratives. Whereas health authority sources provide risk assessments based on statistical predictions, NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières’s coverage rather build on narrative evidence and personalization that focus on victims in stricken African nations. However, although the ways in which health authorities and NGOs frame risk differ, they testify to how the news media in Denmark and Norway tend to support and convey the crisis communication strategies of the institutions that the actors portrayed represent.