Current Projects
Multimodal Communication of Risk Managment: The 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic
This is a joint project with Dr. Rebecca Burnett, exploring how the swine flu pandemic was 'managed' in television interviews via the combination of language choice, gesture, visual set up and ancillary images.
The 'week 1' segments were selected from news footage between April 23-30, 2009. These segments illustrate how the Swine Flu 'problem' was dealt with and characterized at the start of the rise in cases. In contrast, the 'Pandemic' segments were chosen from footage broadcast between June 11-18th, 2009 -- immediately following the announcement from the World Health Organization that Swine Flu had reached a pandemic level.
As the goal of the research is to develop an understanding of how risk managment messages are managed in multimodal communication, it was important to examine segments involving government/authoritative speakers (Homeland Security, Center for Disease Control, etc...) and non-government/authoritative speakers (CNN's in-house medical expert Dr. Gupta, and other educated 'experts' such as university academics and medial experts). Additionally, to avoid overt bias, segments were selected from the three major cable news networks (CNN, Fox and MSNBC).
Week 1 Footage |
Pandemic Week Footage |
| CNN (government/authority) | CNN (government/authority) |
| CNN (non-government/authority) | CNN (non-government/authority) |
| CNN (non-interview segment with gov soundbites) (1:25) | CNN (non-interview segment with gov soundbites) |
| FOX (government/authority) (CDC) | CNN (non-interview segment - pandemic announcment -- A) |
| FOX (government/authority) (former head of Homeland Security) | CNN (non-interview segment-- pandemic announcment -- B) |
| FOX (non-government/authority) | CNN (report, cut-in interviews, June 5th) |
| FOX (non-government/authority) | FOX (government/authority) |
| MSNBC (government/authority) | FOX (non-government/authority) (FOX medical expert) |
| MSNBC (non-government/authority) | MSNBC (government/authority) |
| MSNBC (non-government/authority) | |