Barack Ebola and Trump Virus: How news media use diseases to oppose or support political leaders in the United States of America

Abstract

Historically journalists were considered as the Fourth estate, where their roles in society were to keep those in authoritative power accountable for their actions and acted as the voice of the people. In the modern age, the roles of a journalist became more ambiguous with the ever changing tides in politics, economics and society. The technological advancements of mass communication allowed journalism to flourish into multiple different journalistic styles, and its platforms are used for multiple endeavours by media outlets. This research paper hopes to look at pandemic and epidemic journalism and explore how politics, historical contexts, and communication techniques created a partisanship journalistic style. Covid-19 and Ebola are both events that took the media world by storm in the United States and seeing how they were written and articulated are important at scoping out the biases that may be present in news outlets. As U.S Journalism has a deep-rooted history with partisanship that trickled down since the invention of the press machine, this research paper hopes to find out how diseases are used to praise or attack politicians by weaponizing the diseases within discourse. Exploring journalism with political bias, there are a lot of techniques that are used by journalists to convince its readers, and exploring them can allow individuals to be more wary of the news they are in-taking.