Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment

Book excerpt: Broadcast media has a particular fascination with stories that involve risk and health crisis events-disease outbreaks, terrorist acts, and natural disasters-contexts where risk and health communication play a critical role. An evolving media landscape introduces both challenges and opportunities for using communication to manage extreme events and hazardous contexts. Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment addresses issues of risk and health communication with a collection of chapters that reflect state-of-the-art discussion by top scholars in the field. The authors in this volume develop unique and insightful perspectives by employing the best available research on topics such as brand awareness in healthcare communication, occupational safety, climate change communication, local broadcasts of weather emergencies, terrorism, and the Ebola outbreak, among many other areas. It features analysis of new and traditional media that connects disasters, crises, risks, and public policy issues into a coherent fabric. This book bridges a substantial, but sometimes disconnected body of literature, and by doing so asks how contexts related to risk and health communication are best approached, how researchers balance scientific findings with cultural issues, and how scholars study an increasingly media-savvy society with traditional research methods.