Fear of the Fear of the Flu: Assumptions About Media Effects in the 2009 Pandemic

Abstract

In this article, we present a qualitative study of the Norwegian print news coverage of the 2009 pandemic. In initial research, we found fear to be a notable aspect of the coverage. In studying a relevant subsample in-depth, we discovered that, although there was no sound basis on which to make conclusions about what effects the coverage was having on the public, various actors—including media themselves—came on the mediated scene to express fears that it would create fear and panic. We argue that the mediation of the pandemic can hence be seen as a peculiar case of the “third person effect,” that is, the phenomenon that people tend to believe that other people are more severely influenced by the mass media than what they believe themselves to be. This, we suggest, has some implications for how we think about communication in future pandemics and other crises.

Keywords

media effects pandemics swine flu crisis communication third person effect

In a pandemic situation, communication is among the chief tasks of the relevant authorities. Pandemic communication, however, is a tricky task. First, pandemics are out-of-the-ordinary events, and one cannot assume standard principles of communication to apply. These are situations marked by high levels of uncertainty—not just in epidemiological terms but also rhetorically, that is, with regard to the effects of communication (Blakely, 2006; Millar & Heath, 2003; Mral & Vigsö, 2013). Furthermore, pandemics call on scientific experts to give an account of the threat, and on the authorities to provide science-based advice about how to respond. This presents a challenge, which is to establish a rapport between expert and lay discourses, between scientists and the public. The situation is exacerbated when these scientists and authorities choose to communicate via popular media, as this route is fraught with the possibility of exaggeration, misunderstanding, rearrangement, and backlash (Carlsen & Riese, 2016; Hargreaves & Ferguson, 2000). According to critics, the media tend to reduce and simplify, exaggerate and sensationalize; whenever science enters the media sphere, nuance and precision are reportedly lost (see, e.g., Grey, Wang, & Bolland, 2016; McCartney, 2016; Stewart, 2003). A backdrop for these difficulties is the media’s tendency—whether assumed or real—to highlight dramatic events, not to mention the drama of events (Moeller, 1999; Nacos, Bloch-Elkon, & Shapiro, 2011).

In this article, we turn our attention to the mediated drama of the latest pandemic on record, the 2009 swine (H1N1) flu. In this case, both national and international health authorities relied heavily on mass media to inform and advice the public, and this makes the swine flu a relevant case from which to gain insights into science-based communication in situations of crisis. As we will argue, the swine flu is not a case from which one can draw simple and straightforward lessons. The complications this case presents might nevertheless offer some important second-order lessons.

Although a substantial amount of research on the 2009 pandemic already exists, we would argue that further research on various aspects of this episode is still warranted. Because pandemics are such rare events, we need, in order to maintain communicative preparedness, to understand the societal changes that take place in between each such episode. In the present context, the issue at stake is the status of mediated science advice itself. There is an emerging consensus in the research literature that the status of scientific expertise has undergone dramatic change in recent decades (Collins, 2014; Kitcher, 2011; Turner, 2003), a change that many argue is still ongoing, as in current concerns about “post-truth politics” and “post-factual society” (Thompson, 2016). There is consequently a concern, within public health milieus as well as more broadly, that the authorities’ crisis communication has been made rhetorically unstable by the fact that science-based advice “no longer commands automatic respect” (Hilgartner, 2000, p. 4). This is a particularly acute issue in the case of pandemics, where the degree to which the public heeds the official authorities’ advice can affect the lives of individuals as well as the immunity of the community. This is not just an abstract truth: It was demonstrably the case that expertise was challenged during the swine flu pandemic (Carlsen & Glenton, 2016).

The mediation of the flu began on April 25, 2009, the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) had issued a worldwide Disease Outbreak Notice, declaring that a new influenza had been detected in Mexico. Epidemiologists expect flu pandemics to occur with a certain interval, and after the Avian flu outbreak of 2005 had not reached pandemic scales, public health officials were by 2009 anxiously anticipating the next one.¹ When the news arrived from Mexico, the WHO’s response was thus swift and forceful. A “public health emergency of international concern” was declared, and the pandemic alert level was raised, first from 3 to 4, and then from 4 to 5, by April 29. On June 11, it was raised again, to Level 6, which meant that a pandemic was declared (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010). The WHO’s lead was quickly followed up by the various national health authorities, who turned to their respective populations with information and advice—in general by way of the media. In Norway, from where we draw most of our material, the health authorities informed the public through press conferences, daily reports and press releases, participation in radio, press, and TV interviews and debates, as well as op-eds in the newspapers.

From the very start, then, the swine flu became the object of an immense amount of media attention (Duncan, 2009). When it became clear, however, that the immensity of coverage did not match the relative mildness of the disease, many began criticizing the media for dramatizing and sensationalizing the outbreak (Klemm, Das, & Hartmann, 2016; Wagner-Egger et al., 2011). In the research literature, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the issue of whether the media hyped the issue, whether the coverage was “sensationalist.” Some contributions have argued that this was indeed the case (Goodall, Sabo, Cline, & Egbert, 2012; Hornmoen, 2011), while others have argued that the media cannot be blamed for the dramatic scenario that was conveyed, as they primarily forwarded the messages of scientists and health authorities (Hilton & Hunt, 2011; Keil, Shönhöfer, & Spelsberg, 2011; Vasterman & Ruigrok, 2013).

Regardless of conclusion, however, the bulk of this research approaches the issue with what we would argue is an unhelpful view of the relation between science, media, and the public. As argued by Bucchi (1998), the “canonical account” of science communication operates on an assumption that each of these actors is self-contained, and that science communication is a matter of journalists translating, into a simplified form, the “‘pure,’ reliable knowledge” (p. 3) of the scientists to a largely passive public. This view allows scientists to distance themselves from the mediation, leaving them “free to deprecate its faults and excesses, namely, inaccuracy and spectacularization” (p. 4); it leads to self-deprecation among journalists, who ponder their own failure to convey science responsibly; and it suggests an understanding of audience where scientists themselves are “the only observers authorized to assess” (p. 4) the “uptake” of scientific knowledge in the public. This view routinely opens up accusations against the media of “distortion, sensationalization and inaccurate translation,” Bucchi explains, but such terms “only make sense by reference to the most outdated models of communication” (pp. 3-4). According to Bucchi, we should rather see the public communication of scientific knowledge and advice “as a complicated tangle of processes and transformations through which science is appropriated, used or simply neglected by different audiences” (p. 7; see also Holliman, 2011).

In this article, we have endeavored to take Bucchi’s (1998) call for complication seriously. Drawing on research from a project on the communication of the pandemic in Norway, our objective is to study how various actors contributed to mediating the flu. We see “the media” not as a self-contained, uniform actor but as a stage on which a large variety of actors played their respective parts. Editors, journalists, and others employed by the media are certainly among the actors on this stage, but they are, importantly, not alone. In what follows, then, the reference of the phrase “the media” oscillates between “a stage” and “a particular subset of actors on that stage,” a view that owes much to Hilgartner’s (2000) use of theatrical metaphors in the study of science advice, which he in turn adapts from Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgical perspective on society” (Hilgartner, 2000, p. 7). Hilgartner’s purpose in developing this perspective is to “examine how credibility is produced in social action” (Hilgartner, 2000, p. 7), more concretely, how the various performers in this “public drama” “cast themselves as trustworthy advisors” and thus “create credible voices for themselves” (Hilgartner, 2000, p. 5). Adapting Hilgartner’s perspective to the swine flu, the question we pose in this article is, “If the mediation of science advice can be seen as a drama, what kind of performance was the 2009 outbreak of swine flu?”

In the following, we will highlight how a broad range of actors in this case came on the mediated stage to express concerns that fear and/or panic would ensue from the media coverage. Our study starts from an observation that no one had any way of firmly showing that such reactions were common; there was little solid (or even anecdotal) evidence of any widespread fear. Rather, in this case, a variety of actors joined as an ensemble, to build the swine flu story on the assumption that the coverage would frighten people. This finding leads us to suggest that the mediation of the swine flu pandemic was a peculiar case of the so-called third person effect (Davison, 1983)—that is, the tendency to assume that other people are more severely affected than oneself by a (negative) media message. What is peculiar about the effect in this case is that the link between media coverage and fear was made in the media itself, in practically all genres, through practically all types of sources—from editorials to news reports, feature articles to profile interviews, op-eds to readers’ letters, and commentaries to paragraphs. Our study shows that, as various actors found their respective places on the mediated stage, they all assumed that the effects of the drama would weigh harder on everyone else than it would on them. This, we suggest, has some implications for how we think about communication in pandemics and other crises.

Method

Research Context

The research we did for this article emanates from a research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council, in which the main objective was to understand the relations and dynamics between the central actors—scientists, authorities, media, and the public—involved in science communication controversies, using the H1N1 pandemic as an elaborate example. Our project was designed to learn more about how the communication in this particular case was planned, executed, modified, disseminated, and decoded.

Our primary data for the present article were news material from Norway, a country that was particularly interesting for several reasons, the most important being that Norway had among the highest total number of news stories about the swine flu (Duncan, 2009). Furthermore, Norway has traditionally been characterized by very high levels of societal trust (Delhey, Newton, & Welzel, 2011), which includes trust in public institutions like the health authorities (see Brønn, 2011). Therefore, one could expect that changing relations between the actors involved in science controversies would be particularly salient here. In addition, Norway is a relatively small, tight-knit, and—in many ways—still quite homogeneous country, where it is within reach to get an overview of the political and bureaucratic apparatus, or more generally, the field of “experts,” involved in a particular issue like the pandemic. Likewise, the number and reach of media outlets are also quite manageable, which allows one to study a large part of the total media material and get a general view of how the pandemic was communicated.

A critical issue concerning the communication of the pandemic in Norway was the health authorities’ ability to cooperate among themselves and to convey their agreed-on assessments and advice to the population—not least about the flu vaccine—in an effective way. The authorities were at this point still plagued by the memory of the blunders made during the 2004 tsunami, the aftermath of which had caused significant updates to the country’s preparedness routines (Norwegian Government, 2005). The 2009 pandemic was the first test, as it were, of these changes. Evaluations after the fact determined that many parts of the response had indeed worked well but, also, that the authorities had made some unfortunate communicative choices, not least the infamous “worst-case scenario” (see below). Ultimately, around 900,000 Norwegians were estimated to have contracted the disease, and upward of 1,300 were hospitalized. Less than 30 Norwegians died of the disease. The vaccination rate was high compared to most countries, about 45%, but still far too low to ensure herd immunity (Direktoratet for samfunnssikkerhet og beredskap, 2010).

Methodological Approach

Our project began with an explorative approach, studying large amounts of the news coverage. The rationale for beginning with such an approach comes from Robert Darnton’s (1982) idea of the “communications circuit,” which focuses on studying the “life cycle” of a text (or set of texts) within larger, sociocultural wholes (p. 67). This approach thus replaces models of communication with concrete histories of the same. As Darnton points out, this approach is demanding, and one cannot expect any single study to encompass every aspect of the communications circuit. This is obviously the case for the present study as well: While our research project as a whole incorporates several parts of the communications circuit—authorities, scientists, journalists/editors, and members of the public—we focus, in the present article, exclusively on the media coverage. Importantly, however, we see the media not as a uniform entity but rather as a sort of stage (see Hilgartner, 2000), on which a large variety of actors play their respective parts. Consequently, our objective has been not to understand the “media coverage,” as such, but to use the media coverage as a source, in order to understand how various actors act and react in a situation like a pandemic. We did not predefine a scheme of actors that we wanted to study; instead, the identification of actors emerged as part of the explorative work. Some groups of actors were identified using obvious markers—for instance, “commentators” designated those who wrote commentaries and “editors” those who wrote editorial articles. Other categories were identified somewhat more loosely—for instance, “ordinary readers” are represented by readers’ letters, and the designation “independent experts” refers to anyone with apparent academic credentials who are not invested in the official public health apparatus.²

Sampling Procedure and Preliminary Analyses

After some preliminary experiments with search words, our search was conducted using the Norwegian language equivalents to “pandemic,” “swine flu,” and “H1N1” (with variations), in the news database Retriever. This database, which is also known as Atekst, is the main news database in Norway and catalogues all the major national newspapers, a long list of local and regional newspapers, as well as magazines, press agencies, online news sites, and other news outlets.

A search of all news stories, using the above search words, from April 24, 2009 (when the flu first appeared in the news) to August 11, 2010 (when the pandemic had just been declared over), generated a total of 77,245 hits. A great deal of this material emanated from online sources and various miscellaneous publications—including niche magazines, and so on—and we considered this volume excessive for an in-depth qualitative study. Narrowing the search to print sources only, the total number of hits was reduced to 17,557, which we still considered unmanageable. These searches nevertheless led to an important discovery, which was that the coverage exhibited three quantitative “peaks,” with corresponding “valleys” in-between. Since each peak appeared to us—in random sample preliminary readings of the material—to have characteristic qualitative features, we decided to study each peak separately.

The present article thus presents an in-depth study of the first peak of the coverage, from April 24, 2009, to May 11, 2009. The start date of this search is the day before the official announcement of the occurrence of the flu by the WHO; the end date is one day after the first wave of news stories about the swine flu subsided strongly. This search generated a total of 12,607 hits, and the material included practically every print news genre—editorials, op-eds, commentaries, news stories, feature-like articles, and so on—across national, regional, and local media. We read this material briefly to gain a brief overview of the material, as well as to discover relevant themes (Ryan & Bernard, 2003). Our primary discovery was that the motive of fear was one notable aspect of the coverage. This theme stood out both in its frequency (1,483 of the stories in this selection included the word “fear”) and, as importantly, in its intensity (Foss, 2009, p. 66). It was a central theme of the mediated drama that was the swine flu.

In order to make the material manageable, we decided to narrow our selection to the coverage from all the national newspapers, press agencies, and magazines, as well as from two regional newspapers, Bergens Tidende and Stavanger Aftenblad.³ This generated a total of 564 hits. This material formed the basis of our in-depth study, which we focused specifically on how the various actors contributed to the theme of fear.

We should note that although news media in Norway were traditionally tied to political parties or interests, these ties have long since been broken, and the coverage of the major newspapers today tends to overlap greatly.⁴ At least in the case of Norway, we can thus count newspapers as a good source with which to study “pandemic communication.” That is not to say that Norwegian print media necessarily cover the whole range of views in the population or that they do so in a way that corresponds with the prevalence of, or typical patterns of interaction between, those views. It is, however, to point out that our material represents not any particular fringe of the public discourse on the pandemic, but—actually—the core of that discourse.

Analytical Approach and Presentation of Findings

We proceeded to analyze this material in-depth using an inductive and interpretive analytical approach (Altheide & Schneider, 2012). In outline, we analyzed the material by continually positing observations about the material as emerging hypotheses, which we discussed among ourselves. Thereafter, we returned to study the texts and their contexts, adjusted our hypotheses again, and returned once more to the material, in a reiterative process that went on until both authors agreed that our findings were trustworthy (see Smith, 2007). More concretely, our analyses were guided by our interest in how various actors played their roles on the mediated stage (see Hilgartner, 2000)—an objective which meant analyzing how they represented themselves and others and, especially, how they contributed to making fear a central theme in the swine flu drama. In particular, we were interested in discovering the rhetorical efforts made by various actors to establish their views as authoritative, that is, the work they put down “to achieve credibility” (Hilgartner, 2000, p. 3).

We made three main discoveries: First, we noticed that a broad range of actors—including political leaders and health authorities, physicians, bankers, editors, commentators, independent experts, and ordinary readers—claimed that the news coverage was creating fear or panic. Second, regardless of who was making this claim, it was very rarely backed up by any kind of evidence. Third, although the discourse referred routinely to fear and panic, hardly anyone admitted to being afraid or panicking themselves. These discoveries led us to consider the swine flu case in terms of the third person effect, albeit a special case. We should point out that we, in making our argument, make mention of only a few of the total number of articles that we count as our evidence. These examples were chosen as illustrations, because we found that they could display the different voices and aspects of fear discourse that is in the material. To be clear, the case we are making rests not on the quantitative frequency of the third person effect in this case but on the fact that a wide variety of actors and groups exhibited this attitude. In other words, our study does not tell us how numerically widespread the effect was, but it does tell us that it was widely stretched across social and occupational space. This tells us something about the assumptions that various actors were making about each other in this situation, which therefore also may occur in similar situations, which in turn is essential knowledge for the ambition to communicate science-based advice.

Mediating Second-Order Fear

In the immediate mediation of the swine flu outbreak, Norwegian newspapers applied a characteristically fear-centered rhetoric (see also Goodall et al., 2012). Readers were bombarded by images of health care personnel in high-tech protection gear, commuters with face masks, not to mention front page headlines with declarations such as “The Horror Flu Threat” (Isbrekken & Fuglehaug, 2009), “Fears the Whole World Can Be AFFLICTED” (Nielsen, 2009), “Epidemic Threatens The World” (Langved, 2009), “Deadly Flu Spreads Fear” (“Dødelig influensa,” 2009), “The US Holds Its Breath—Fear of Epidemic Spreads” (Ask, 2009), and “Authorities to Wake Norwegians—Minister Of Health With Horror Scenario: 13,000 May Die” (Kirkebøen, 2009).⁵

There should, in other words, be no doubt that (at least parts of) the Norwegian media used a highly dramatic idiom in its early coverage (see also Hornmoen, 2011). The issue at stake here, however, is whether fear and/or panic was a significant effect of this drama and, further, whether different actors who claimed that it was had any good reason to believe so. Our argument is that those who came on the scene to make this claim did not refer to any solid evidence this was the case but rather only assumed this to be so, and further, that they also assumed this effect to affect other people more severely than it did them.

The drama that emerged on the mediated stage revolved not so much around a genuine fear of the flu, as around a fear of the fear of the flu (see also Goldacre, 2009; Nerlich & Koteyko, 2011). In other words, a metadiscourse was established in the media coverage, where various actors expressed concerns about the rhetorical effects of the swine flu story alongside the epidemiological effects of the disease itself. This is nicely exemplified by a story from the regional daily Bergens Tidende, where one headline categorized the situation as “Light Panic.” The article reported that American pharmacies were now running out of Tamiflu, and that American health authorities had released its emergency reserves of the medicine, adding, “There is now a fear that people who fear they will become ill begin to stockpile the medicine” (“Mexicansk toåring,” 2009). In other words, the fear of the swine flu was no less central than the fear of the fear of the swine flu, as a large number of different voices made assumptions about what effects the mediation of this story would have on other people.

It is part of our argument that this assumption about a link between media coverage and (the prospect of) fear was spread widely, across the different actors who come on the stage to mediate the swine flu. It can be observed first at the very top, as it were, among political leaders. In a story detailing the spread of the disease, incidentally titled “A Spectre Haunts the World,” Dagsavisen quoted U.S. president Barack Obama as saying, “There is cause for concern, and we have to increase our preparedness. But there is no cause for panic” (Bredeveien, 2009). The phrase, “There is no cause for panic,” is interesting not so much for what it says as for what it implies, namely, that a lot of people are panicking, or at least, that they are in danger of panicking. The same is arguably the case with the early statements made by Norway’s Minister of Health, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen, who said, “We face a threat of 1.2 million ill with the flu and 13,000 more deaths from a swine flu pandemic” but added to this “worst-case scenario” that people “ought not to be worried” (Ruud, Kristianssen, & Barstein, 2009a) and should “behave as usual” (Ruud, Kristianssen, & Barstein, 2009b).

In some cases, the link between the media coverage and fear was made by or through experts. On April 30, for instance, a research fellow of risk and security studies was a source for a story in Dagbladet, a leading tabloid. “The media are creating moral panic,” he stated, and elaborated, “Media stories about the swine flu have contributed to creating moral panic, and this can have some undesirable consequences.” The researcher believed the media’s coverage was creating fear in the population, and among the consequences he envisaged would ensue were “racism towards Mexicans” and “Norwegian pig farmers [forced] into bankruptcy” (Andersen, 2009).

The assumption of panic was often tied to reports of Tamiflu stockpiling, similar to the story from New York. Representatives of the health authorities were also used as sources in these stories, and they too expressed concerns that the “buzz” around the flu could stir up fear and panic. Dagsavisen reported that the Institute of Public Health “Warns Against Medicine Hysteria,” citing Bjørn Gunnar Iversen, a representative of the Institute: “Of course, if people munch on Tamiflu because they fear the swine flu, the virus may in the worst case become resistant to the medicine. And Tamiflu is not an effective anxiolytic.” Later in the same story, Iversen expressed that he thought “most people have now calmed down somewhat” and that “Our experience, from talking to ordinary people, is that they are not particularly afraid.” Given the lack of evidence that people had been that afraid to start with, the representative, when he saw this as an indication that “we have reached people with the message that this looks to be a mild flu virus” (Paulsen, 2009), could arguably be seen to simultaneously overestimate the importance of their communicative efforts and underestimate the public’s media literacy.

When reports about stockpiling were targeted against doctors, representatives of Norway’s physicians were often called on to respond. They too tended to corroborate the link between mediation of the flu and the creation of fear. Interestingly, they did not necessarily see stockpiling as an expression of fear in itself but pointed out that news about stockpiling could create panic. In a story in Bergens Tidende, the president of the Norwegian Medical Association was interviewed. “She is afraid that there will be unrest in the population if doctors or others begin stockpiling medicines,” reported the newspaper, and then cited the president of the dentists’ association, whose members were presumably among the stockpiling culprits: “It can easily ignite the mood that someone is considering themselves and their own, and do not respect the authorities’ message. We have to keep a cool head” (“Tester smitteprøver,” 2009). These representatives were not saying that panic had set in; their tone was hypothetical—“there will be,” “it can,” and “we have to.” But these hypothetical concerns were just as revealing, since they clearly indicated what they thought could or even would happen, that is, “unrest,” an “ignited mood,” and—by implication—“hot heads.” Doctors were in general not exempt from making the assumption that the mediation of the pandemic was creating fear. In one case, a chief epidemiologist at Bergen’s main hospital spelled out this assumption explicitly and, one could say, radically. The doctor, Akselsen, gave an account of the measures they were currently taking, but according to the newspaper, he was just as “concerned to avoid overreactions. ‘We may see panic upon hearing about the first cases [in Norway], which can lead to nonrational actions’” (“Tester smitteprøver,” 2009), by which the doctor seems to have meant the closing of schools and public transport, and so on.

Apart from political leaders, risk analysts, health officials, and doctors, another interesting group to come on the stage was bankers and other representatives of finance. A main focus of the largest financial newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv, was how the fear that (assumedly) resulted from the media coverage would have an impact on markets and stock exchanges. In one such story, under the headline, “Impacts on the Markets,” the article reported that a major bank, SEB, now warned the public not to panic. Interestingly, despite the headline—in fact, despite the impression left by all the major elements of the article—the point of the text itself was to underline that the experience from the recent avian flu was that people did not panic. “‘[T]here’s a lot of psychology, but the experience from the avian flu tells us that neither consumers nor companies were particularly frightened,’ Bergquist says” (Lund, 2009).

This apparent paradox is worth pausing at, in order that our focus on various groups of media sources should not place the media themselves in the dark. In fact, examples such as the one above, where the article’s most eye-catching elements—headline, images, introduction, highlighted quotes, and so on—signal fear or panic, while the actual text moderated the impression, are an indication that the media (considered now not as a stage but as an independent actor) also contributed to making fear a central motive of the swine flu drama. These are after all elements that can only be attributed to writers, editors, desk journalists, and other newspaper staff.

The media’s own contribution to making this link surfaced also in articles written by newspaper editors. In one editorial, from Stavanger Aftenblad, the unnamed writer established, “There are many other diseases in the world which ought perhaps to receive at least an equal amount of attention.” The writer went on to make the link between “alarm readiness” like the one currently in place and the public sentiment of fear, noting that although health professionals might have a sensible understanding of the context of the present measures, “Most people experience the warnings and the medical preparedness as frightening. An evaluation of potential death tolls as a result of a worldwide influenza is often the basis for fear” (“Sykdommer og forebygging,” 2009). On what basis the writer could establish that most people were frightened by this, we are never told.

The assumption that the mediation of the flu spurred fear could be found not just in news stories and editorials but also in the opinion and commentary sections. Commentators focused on the fact that panic, in this first period, seemed to be spreading faster than the disease itself—with one commentator noting that “the relation between panic and pandemic goes beyond etymology” (Madsen, 2009). This seems like a sophisticated point, perhaps, until one realizes that these articles could offer no evidence that there was panic on any scale worth mentioning. These articles are particularly interesting in the present context, not because they documented fear, or even gave the semblance of documenting it, but because they simply took that reaction for granted and made the assumed reaction a topic for coverage in its own right. One example is an article by the health commentator Anne Hafstad, under the title “Fear Not!” It began by stating, “The fear that now spreads is probably unjustified in Norway. But because of the uncertainty, the threat must be taken seriously.” In other words, the writer simply established that fear was spreading, although that had arguably not been documented by either the media or the authorities, and although the writer herself could give no evidence of that being the case. The Norwegian authorities had organized a large press conference, where they had used a worst-case scenario comparing the swine flu to the Spanish flu. This revealed the dilemma the authorities found themselves in, wrote Hafstad (2009),

Their obvious dilemma is that they by sounding the alarm can create unnecessary fear in the population . . . [But] if they are silent about the risk that threatens us, and the pandemic arrives, one can easily imagine the massive criticism that would be directed at those responsible.

There were really no grounds for fear, Hafstad (2009) argued, while she nevertheless assumed that her readers were in fact afraid: “It is natural that many of us grow anxious when we hear reports about serious contagion and disease in relative proximity.”

In another article, under the heading, “When Panic Contaminates,” another commentator wrote, “the tempo of the spread of the disease itself cannot be compared with how fast the fear of the virus spreads.” The writer reveals, however, that he is talking about the “spread” of the media story, not of any actual panic. “Whenever there is talk of a threatening outbreak of virus—far from our shores—it never takes long before newspapers and websites begin issuing headlines against a black background. The media reeks of apocalypse.” Given the underlying seriousness, the writer concluded, “Both the media and the authorities have a responsibility not to spread unnecessary fear. That too can become a public health issue” (Nyqvist, 2009b). Interestingly, the same commentator wrote on the pandemic a week later, now in “retrospect”: “When even doctors were persuaded to write prescriptions for Tamiflu, without a single valid medical justification for doing so, that speaks plenty about how strongly we were gripped by fear.” He added, “In retrospect, we can easily see that the mood was panicky and that the fear was irrational” (Nyqvist, 2009a). But again, it is not at all easy to see that the “mood” was panicky, at least not if that word refers to anything beyond the media coverage itself. When it comes to the actual effects of the coverage on the public, the commentator arguably does no more than make assumptions. And those, as far as they go, might seem somewhat exaggerated. For one, there never surfaced any reliable estimation of how many doctors had prescribed how much Tamiflu to how many patients (and, as we saw above, dentists were reportedly the greater culprits). The counterreaction to reports of Tamiflu stockpiling was very quick, almost immediate—and it seems safe to assume that the extent of these prescriptions was rather marginal. When the commentator takes this to “speak plenty about how strongly we were gripped by fear,” one could more sensibly argue that it speaks first of all about how willing we are to assume fear as an effect of dramatic news, even where we lack evidence of that effect.

Another group that came on the media stage to express the assumption about this effect were ordinary readers of the newspaper. In one reader’s letter, titled “Tabloid Flu,” the letter writer stated, admittedly with a certain sarcasm, that the front pages of the newspapers and the headlines in the TV news “are scaring our pants off” with its “hysteria . . . surrounding the new ‘Black Death.’” As a consequence, the writer established, “‘Everyone’ is keen to wear a face mask.” The press “has a duty of information vis-à-vis the public,” he noted, “but information is precisely what we want—not hysterical headlines which have as their only purpose to sell more papers.” As the coverage was developing, the writer stated, “We will not have time to die of the flu—as we will be dead from dread long before the virus reaches our shores.” He concluded, “Someone ought to report VG and Dagbladet [the leading tabloids] to the Board of Health Supervision—because if there is one thing that threatens our health these days, it is the tabloid flu” (Aasheim, 2009).

Another letter writer, in the regional Stavanger Aftenblad, wrote under the heading “Media Creates a Culture of Fear”:

In the last few weeks, our media have been filled with the dreaded swine virus from Mexico. Anticipated death tolls have been spread across the front pages in splash headings. All while reporters from [the major TV stations] have addressed the camera with face masks and their coarse, nervous voices in front of the most terrifying hospitals they could find. If their aim was to frighten us, they have done a splendid job!

The trouble with this coverage, noted the writer, was that it made people fear marginal dangers, while it neglected to inform them of the real dangers—like those who die “in the thousands each day of aids, malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition.” This type of message, continued the writer,

has an impact on us. It creates a condition marked by low-intensive fear, where people go around and constantly feel “somewhat unsafe.” The media has an unfortunate tendency to create unnecessary fear in society by amplifying that which must be deemed marginal risks, while real dangers are neglected and marginalized. (Kalvatn, 2009)

Clearly, “ordinary readers” is not a uniform group—perhaps even less so than the other groups we have identified so far—and we do not claim to know how widespread the above sentiments were among ordinary people. A certain indication that these letter writers were not alone with their complaints, however, came on May 11, 2009, when a popular website klikk.no—under the heading “Fear of Contagion Created by Media”—published results from a survey of 1,000 Norwegians, who had been asked to respond to the question “Do you believe the media is creating unnecessary fear with its coverage of the swine flu case?” (Holm, 2009). In all, 74.3% responded affirmatively. There are admittedly certain methodological limitations to a poll like this, and the conclusions to be drawn from it are speculative. However, it does—paradoxically—seem to be the case that a preponderance of members of the public thought most other people were scared by the media coverage.

Interestingly, the general public’s assumption of a link between the media coverage and fear in (purportedly the same) public would later be echoed by independent experts, the spearhead of which was arguably Per Fugelli, a well-known and much-respected professor of social medicine. Fugelli at various times criticized both the health authorities and the media, but his most rancid attacks were reserved for the latter. He told media that “the [media] coverage is harmful to our health” (NTB, 2009) and that he felt “the way media has presented this story has agitated the national spirit to an alarmed state of preparedness, as if it were the plague or cholera that was threatening our country” (Haugan, 2009). According to Fugelli, the media was “the big, bad wolf” of the story, which he elaborated as follows:

I think [the Ministry] has handled this situation relatively carefully. They have largely demonstrated sobriety and balance, but the media have made nuclear bombs of this virus. This has caused some to enter a condition of anxiety and fear of disease. The media coverage itself is robbing people of their health. (Haugan, 2009)

In an interview with a news agency, which was printed in several newspapers, the outspoken critic stated, “A fear has been stirred up which the authorities now feel they have to meet [with their mass vaccination scheme],” and the role of the media, he said, should now be to calm the public rather than agitate it. According to the news agency, the professor said that

the massive media coverage could have a negative impact on individuals. . . . “In my opinion, the press coverage has quite simply been perilous to people’s health. The media have contributed to excite panic around the H1N1 virus, and this has no root in reality. This brings a number of people into a state of concern, where they become preoccupied with protecting themselves and their family.” (NTB, 2009)

The professor argued that “the fear mentality can rob people of their quality of life and their health, and can even make them more receptive to disease” (NTB, 2009).

Although a rarity, there were also cases where certain actors came on the mediated stage to play down the causal link between the media coverage and fear. In one such case, Bergens Tidende had interviewed a psychologist at Norway’s only hypochondriac clinic. In contrast to much of the other coverage, the professor suggested that we can “decide independently whether or not to be frightened,” and that “most of us handle this fairly well.” He admitted that “those who are already plagued by anxiety, can become frightened” but added that “those who are level-headed . . . will wait and see.” The newspaper concluded, “The hypochondria expert . . . is not worried that the media coverage of the swine flu creates unjustified fear” (“Bestemmer selv,” 2009).

The Fear of Others’ Fear

Our objective here has been to show how a long line of different actors repeatedly, and in the face of very little evidence (if any at all), came on the media’s stage and assumed that the fear effect was a fact. Admittedly, the media stage did not grant equal access to everyone, and our study tells us nothing about the voices that were never heard. It might of course be the case that those who were not heard were in fact frightened by the media’s rhetoric or that they tended to make other assumptions about the effects of the coverage. That being said, we nevertheless find it striking that everyone from President Obama, to risk analysts, to doctors, health authorities, to newspaper commentators, editors, and journalists, to expert critics, to the public itself used the media as a stage from which they assumed that the media coverage created fear. What is equally important is that as the various parties found their respective places on the mediated stage, they all assumed that the effects of the mediated drama would weigh more heavily on everyone else than it would on them. In the literature on media effects, this tendency is called the “third person effect.” In its classic formulation, by the sociologist W. Phillips Davison (1983),

[T]his hypothesis predicts that people will tend to overestimate the influence that mass communications have on the attitudes and behavior of others. More specifically, individuals who are members of an audience that is exposed to a persuasive communication (whether or not this communication is intended to be persuasive) will expect the communication to have a greater effect on others than on themselves. (p. 3)

Since Davison (1983) proposed this effect, social psychologists have documented its prevalence in a number of areas and occasions, but they are still struggling to make sense of precisely why it should be so prevalent. The third person effect is, as Richard Perloff (1999) says, an “elusive, but persistent, phenomenon” (p. 354). The present study presents an original example—or rather, an original way of documenting—the third person effect. As described by Perloff (1999), the bulk of research is experimental, where individuals are exposed to a media message and “asked to estimate effects on self and others,” though occasionally, “respondents are not exposed to a message at all but instead answer a telephone interviewer’s questions about effects of a particular type of media fare” (p. 357).

This procedure has engendered criticism against the existing research, which suggests that the effect might be “an artifact of the order in which questions are asked” (Perloff, 1999, p. 357). This does not apply in our case, we would argue, simply because our research is not experimental and has indeed not asked any questions at all but rather studied unsolicited expressions of the effect as they appeared on the media stage. Also, although the volume of our material is not necessarily much greater than what is the case in some experimental research on the effect, we have been able to document that the effect was very widely expressed in the media. Our study shows that everyone from American presidents and journalists, doctors and scientists, health authorities and risk analysts, to letter writers and editors, that is, a very broad range of actors, assumed that the mediation of the swine flu would affect certain, typically unspecified, “others” more severely than it would themselves. Another original aspect of the present case is the fact that the effect was expressed so persistently in and by the media themselves. Most of the research on the third person effect, as Perloff points out, studies responses in interviews, polls, or experimental situations. Very little research exists on how media effects themselves are mediated, that is, how the effects of mediation are represented by and in the media. Our study shows that the assumption of the third person effect can be a powerful motive in dramatic coverage of emergency situations like pandemics. In the mediation of this event, the causal link between the media coverage and the effect this coverage was assumed to have on other people was widely distributed across various groups of people.

As we suggested in the introduction, the authorities are, in cases such as these, in a precarious situation and are keen to retain a certain control of the message. Arguably, they can have hope of doing so only if they have an idea about how the public will react. And although the authorities acknowledge that the media often transform their message, our study illustrates a more complex problem, namely, that a multiplicity of actors contribute to the mediation of that message but that most of them assume everyone else to be more severely affected by that mediation. Neither the authorities nor the media (narrowly conceived) was the director of this drama. Rather, a multifarious ensemble of actors all came together to make fear the central motive of the swine flu drama. In response to our initial question, about what kind of a drama this pandemic was, we can now conclude that it was a drama about a “metapanic,” a story of fear of others’ fear. If public dramas like this one are interesting, as Hilgartner (2000) suggested, because they can tell us something about how different actors establish credibility, the swine flu case tells us that such credibility is sometimes sought by way of the distinction implicit in the third person effect. By focusing on how the media coverage (supposedly) creates fear in other people, one demonstrates, by that very act, that one is exempt from—if not to say above—fear.

According to Perloff (1999), the persistence of the third person effect “redounds with implications for policymaking in areas ranging from censorship to elite political decision making” (p. 354). While we believe that is true, we also think that such implications should rest on more knowledge about how this effect works in real-life situations. With reference to the present case, more research should be done to determine whether patterns similar to the one we have identified for Norway can be found also in other—larger and less homogenous—locations. Assuming that our case is not entirely unique, we believe that this study presents two implications in particular for science-based communication in emergency situations.

Implications

First, a theoretical implication of our study is that communication research cannot take assumptions to the effect that “media creates fear” or “dramatic media coverage creates fear” at face value. That is not to say that no such causal link exists. It is rather to point out that this link—if and to the extent that it exists—is more complicated, one might say messier, than it might seem. The prevalence of the third person effect means that we tend to overestimate the effects media has on others—where “overestimate” denotes not only a relative phenomenon, that is, that we estimate media coverage to have a larger effect on others than it has on us, but also, probably, an absolute one, that we think media has more severe effects than it actually has. To complicate our notion of media effects in this way would mean that we, as researchers of the mediation of science and science advice, cannot simply study a selection of media material for its “tone” (Klemm et al., 2016) and assume the effects of that material to follow in a straight line. Rather, we must incorporate insights from fields such as reception studies, where sender intentions and text content tend to be complicated by reader reception. Readers, as philosopher Richard Rorty (1982) suggested, tend to “beat the text into shape” (p. 151). Historian Roger Chartier (1994) elaborates, “Reading, by definition, is rebellious and vagabond,” and readers “use infinite numbers of subterfuges . . . to read between the lines, and to subvert the lessons imposed on them” (p. x). And while those who communicate always try to impose an “order,” they are never entirely successful: “[T]he creators . . . always aspire to pin down their meaning and proclaim the correct interpretation, the interpretation that ought to constrain reading (or viewing). But without fail reception invents, shifts about, distorts” (p. x). A move in this direction would entail accepting uncertainty as an endemic feature of any rhetorical situation. At the same time, they would see that the only way to gain some certainty at all would go through the study of audience, reception, and actual—not assumed—effects (see Kiewe & Houck, 2015).

This brings us to the second, more practical implication of the present study. If we are all able to “see through” the media’s rhetorical workings, then we are all more media literate than we seem to think. To explain, the third person effect says, basically, that we are (alternatively, I am) more media-literate than other people, and that while we are able to identify and demask the media’s sensationalist rhetoric, others will be bulldozed by the same. However, if this assumption is as widely distributed as we have shown, it seems that media literacy, in particular our resilience to sensationalist frames, is more widely distributed as well. It seems like we all—or at least many of us—are able to spot sensationalism in order to deconstruct the media’s rhetorical workings. Although this observation would have to be corroborated by more research, one can speculate that (certain aspects of) media literacy is on the rise due to the move toward user-generated content (Deuze, 2007; Van Dijck, 2009). As we increasingly become producers, and not just consumers, of news ourselves, we might enhance our ability to recognize the rhetoric of news (see Holliman, 2011; Ritzer, Dean, & Jurgenson, 2012; Weeks, Ardèvol-Abreu, & Gil de Zúñiga, 2015).

One consequence of this realization, at least when seen in conjunction with the previous implication, could be that authorities and others who are tasked with communicating to the public in emergency situations need not be so concerned to package their messages strategically, whether the motive is to ignite fear or to soothe it. Rather, those who practice crisis communication would do well to recognize, first, that to communicate through the media is to largely lose control of the message to “rebellious” media users, but second, that these rebels are, after all, rather more competent than most seem to have assumed.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funded by the Rearch Council of Norway, grant number 228419.

Notes

Author Biographies

Kristian Bjørkdahl is a senior researcher at Uni Research Rokkan Centre in Bergen, Norway, with a PhD in rhetorical studies. He is currently working on a project on the communication of the H1N1 flu pandemic in Norway. His previous work includes research and writing on pragmatism, the rhetoric of the animal movement, climate rhetoric, and science communication.

Benedicte Carlsen is a social anthropologist and research professor at Uni Research Rokkan Centre in Bergen, Norway. She holds a PhD in health services research from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Bergen, and has extensive experience from cross-disciplinary research, especially in the field combining medical and social science studies of science communication, scientific literacy, and implementation of guidelines in practice. A common denominator in her work has been the dynamic between experience-based and research-based knowledge.

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