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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 8, No. 5
Publication Date: May 25, 2021
DOI:10.14738/assrj.85.10247.
Xinyan, L., Yijing, L., Siyu, Y., & Yazheng, L. (2021). The Reshaping of Medical Image by News Reports During COVID-19 's Epidemic
Situation. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 8(5). 390-400.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
The Reshaping of Medical Image by News Reports During COVID- 19 's Epidemic Situation
Lu Xinyan
School of Journalism and Communication, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601
Lu Yijing
School of Journalism and Communication, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601
Yue Siyu
School of Journalism and Communication, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601
Li Yazheng
School of Journalism and Communication, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601
ABSTRACT
Medical image has always been a long-term topic in social life, through
questionnaires and personal interviews to investigate the role of news reports on
the reconstruction of medical image before and after the epidemic. Through the
investigation, it can be found that the media has played a certain intermediary role
and positive guiding role in the alleviation of doctor-patient relationship and the
shaping of medical portrayals; some metaphorical discourse descriptions in news
reports can achieve better communication effect; through a variety of reporting
forms and attribute agenda settings, the media enriches the foreground image of
doctors and indirectly shapes the social image of doctors.
Key Words: Covid-19 epidemic, News Report, Medical Image
INTRODUCTION
In the typical reports about doctors, the professional image of medical staff is mainly positive
for a long time, and the common topics include doctors delving into medical skills, doctors
saving lives, hospitals serving the people and so on. In the period of new media, the media image
of medical staff began to change. The news media exposed the "sky-high medical fees" of
medical institutions, doctors receiving red packets and kickbacks, medical accidents and
doctor-patient disputes, and so on. It’s just like the phenomenon described by Lupton, D. (1998)
that members of the medical profession may be constantly under the spotlight of media
scrutiny.
However, reports focusing on extreme events emerge one after another, and the image of
medical groups is constantly negative. Market-oriented medical institutions and doctors are
bound to the stereotype of "service profitability" and "lack of conscience”. This is similar to the
media representations of medicine and the medical profession in the United States, Britain and
Australia, which have noted a shift from the ‘saintly (male) hero in white coat’ portrayal to a
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Xinyan, L., Yijing, L., Siyu, Y., & Yazheng, L. (2021). The Reshaping of Medical Image by News Reports During COVID-19 's Epidemic Situation.
Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 8(5). 390-400.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.85.10247
more diverse and critical portrayal, in which the personal failings and problems of doctors have
also received coverage.(Karpf, 1988a; Turow, 1989; Bury and Gabe,1994; Bradby et al., 1995;
Lupton, 1995).
After the outbreak of COVID-19, the sudden public safety and health incident made the media
pay more attention to the health care industry. We are concerned that many changes have taken
place in health care-related reports during and after the epidemic, not only with increased
density, but also with richer content, more diverse forms and more diversified focus. Will these
reports reshape the images of health care workers? How to reconstruct the images of medical
media? What kind of inspiration can the actual impact of these changes in reporting give us to
our future news work? The above are the main issues discussed in this paper, but also to
support the significance of this study.
REVIEW OF RELATED RESEARCH
News reports play an important role in influencing the cognition and behavior of audiences.
Walter Lippmann believes that the reports of the news media will affect the public's perception
of the real world and construct the picture in their minds (Liu Hailong 2008). Walter Lippmann
(1922) talked about the image as ‘pictures in our heads.’ These images are shaped not only by
our personal experiences, but also by what we learn from other people. Therefore, the
stereotypes that we come to hold are influenced by the social communication, and therefore
are likely to represent the biases of those interactions. Later, Kenneth Boulding (1956) further
stated the ‘image’ that we all hold in our thoughts about the rest of the world. Boulding voiced
some realization of the fact that as people become more dependent on the media for their
cognition about the world, the possibility for erroneous pictures of the world increases. While
many pictures about the world have depicted by us, very few of them are actually based on
personal experiences.
Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert King Merton proposed that the mass media has social status
conferral function, and the media report can arouse people's attention to the reporting object
and legitimize its status (Liu Shuangqing 2016). The study found that the media is the main
source of health information, and more than 80% of the public rely on television, magazines,
newspapers and other media for health information, which is much higher than the proportion
of the public getting health information from doctors (Covello, V.T., &Peters, R.G, 2002). News
media portrayal of doctors and the highlight of reporting on medical political issues make
significant contributions to the agenda for the development of public opinion on the medical
profession. (Lupton, D.1998).
To a certain extent, the report of the official media plays a guiding role in the cognition of the
audience. Some studies showed that doctors themselves are also worried about what they
perceive to be an overwhelmingly negative and distorted portrayal of their profession in the
news media, contending that a ‘trial by media’ is occurring (Karpf, 1988b; Elston,1991). To
promote people to have a better understanding of doctor-patient relationship and medical
image, news reports will often use metaphorical ways to guide public opinion and build social
cognition. In news reports, newspapers often use metaphors such as disease, war, family and
so on, so that the audience can briefly and clearly understand what kind of social status doctors
and patients are in and what kind of social role they play in society and daily life. However to
reach a better communicating effct, some exaggerated stereotypic portrayals existed inevitably.
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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 8, Issue 5, May-2021
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Because ‘stereotypic portrayals may provide the lowest common denominator on which to
build storylines; perhaps without exaggerating or distorting writers and producers have
difficulty creating interesting yet credible characters and situations’ (Sprafkin, J. N., & Liebert,
R. M. 1978).
Media reports play a promotive role in shaping the relationship between doctors and patients.
Niu Weihong (2016) mentioned in ‘reflection on the current Medical reports in China’ that the
mass media has played an important role in spreading and popularizing health care knowledge
and supervising and standardizing the medical order, but at the same time, the mass media also
has an inescapable responsibility in malicious hype, false reports, misleading the public and so
on. Due to the selective deviation of medical reports and the little sense of journalistic
professionalism, the doctor-patient relationship has gradually deteriorated.
The development of new technology also makes the contradiction between doctors and
patients more acute. The development of Internet technology has brought convenience to
interpersonal communication. At the same time, the mass and uncertainty of communication
content, as well as the anonymization of communication identity, make Internet fraud cases
more and more serious. False medical advertisements on the Internet platform have led to the
deterioration of the relationship between doctors and patients. In addition, the borderless
presentation of doctors and patients from the perspective of collectivism and relativism in news
reports may be one of the factors leading to the tension in the current doctor-patient
relationship. Collectivism and relativism suppress the rights between doctors and patients, and
the contradictions between doctors and patients cannot be resolved, resulting in the conflict
between doctors and patients.
At the beginning of 2020, the epidemic caused by Covid-19 coronavirus broke out all over the
world. in the face of sudden health public events, doctors and patients once again stepped on
the forefront of public opinion and become the focus of media attention and reports.
RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
In this study, the ‘medical image’ is set as an independent variable, the channel, the way and the
number of media reports are taken as dependent variables, and the empirical research method
is used to explore the relationship between the two variables. and the reasons that affect the
relationship between the two, and conducted a questionnaire survey on the recipients of
information.
For the survey of the general audience, the author uses the method of questionnaire survey to
investigate and analyze their cognitive situation. According to the design type of the
questionnaire, the designed questionnaire belongs to the structured questionnaire, with a total
of 19 questions, and finally collected 305 valid questionnaires. In the process of designing the
questionnaire, the author conducted a pre-survey, according to the results of the pre-survey
data, judged the lack of comparison of relevant variables before and after the epidemic in the
questionnaire, and could not obtain the cognitive changes of the audience on the image of health
care and the relationship between doctors and patients. After many revisions and
improvements, the final data successfully obtained the changes of the interviewees' attitude,
recognition, trust and responsibility attribution to the health care image before and after the
epidemic.