A crash course in changing the world.
This week we had to investigate the five secrets of Crisis Communication. When it comes to a pandemic communication plays a decisive role to ensure public security. Therefore the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard had prepared the five most important communication issues to handle such situations:
- Coming to Terms with Uncertainty
- Covering Risk
- Outbreak Communication
- Managing Panic in a Pandemic
- People’s reactions
In my opinion the issue to manage panic in a pandemic is the most important term to face. When a disease outbreak occurs people are more likely to get in panic. The fear of disease transmission paired with an uncertainty how high the risk of infection might be could degenerate to mass panic.
To prevent such incidents governmental institutions and the press have to work closely together in their communication of information. In the article of Neman Foundation an epidemiologist explains how the government uses insights from behavioral and social science research to maintain public trust and get messages across in a crisis. Thereby overall journalists play a key role to manage fear among the population.
The first point to deal with is to preserve public trust. The best way to ensure a consistent information base for measurement communication is to integrate the press in the process. For example implementations of broadcasted discussions of experts with empirical evidence to support the notion that good things will happen if people do them. That's called push technology. A message fitting to the people’s concerns has to be spread to calm them. With the right communication strategy public trust could be achieved and miserable scenarios could be prevented – suitable contents to publish are safety, calming, connection, efficacy and hope. Journalists have to take these five ideas and infuse them in their messages.
If all parties are working in one line together panic could be avoided and the pandemic situation better be controlled.
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