Katherine A. Foss, Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory

Extract

Amidst the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, Katherine Foss’s Constructing the Outbreak underscores the formative influence of media coverage in shaping the collective narratives that make outbreaks legible to the public. Outbreaks, Foss reminds us, are narrative phenomena: newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, and later radio and television all contribute to how communities talk about health crises and their ramifications. Not only do these narrative forms convey important information about these outbreaks—facts about symptoms and risk factors, strategies for prevention and containment—but also they do ideological work. For Foss, news reporting on epidemics does more than simply witness an epidemic event; it animates and mediates the very cultural, social, and political anxieties surrounding these events and those understood as its agents. Reportage, especially in terms of health and disease, is thus never innocuous or impartial but instead highly contested cultural space of “conflicting discourses based on audience” that are inflected by the values of communities and nations (p. 211).