Canadian Media Representations of Mad Cow Disease

Abstract

A Canadian case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or “mad cow disease” was confirmed in May, 2003. An in-depth content analysis of newspaper articles was conducted to understand the portrayal of BSE and variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) in the Canadian media. Articles in the “first 10 days” following the initial discovery of a cow with BSE in Canada on May 20, 2003, were examined based on the premise that these initial stories provide the major frames that dominate news media reporting of the same issue over time and multiple occurrences. Subsequent confirmed Canadian cases were similarly analyzed to determine if coverage changed in these later media articles. The results include a prominence of economic articles, de-emphasis of health aspects, and anchoring the Canadian outbreak to that of Britain's crisis. The variation in media representations between those in Canada and those documented in Britain are explored in this study.

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by Alberta Ingenuity through the Alberta Prion Research Institute, and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) (which provided support funding for the principal author). The authors thank Dr. Naomi Krogman from the University of Alberta and two anonymous Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article.

Notes

*The National Research Council defines risk as the concept used to give meaning to things, forces, or circumstances that pose a danger to people and what they value (Stern & Fineberg, 1996).

*A “signal event” can be defined as an incident that may affect the perceptions of activities related to the signal event. Svenson (1998) refers to these signal events when she states that “many risks are abstract and remote and most of us are overly optimistic about our own personal risks in many situations, [and] some concrete events may change that partly self-deceptive perception quite drastically” (p. 199).

*Newspapers can be considered quality press when they “(1)” address the “intelligentsia,” i.e., the elites and decision makers of a country; (2) are distributed nationally rather than regionally; and (3) provide a broad and in-depth coverage of news and background information (Russ-Mohl, 2008).