Zika Virus Summary

The media serves an interesting purpose, which is to educate the reader, but only to the degree that the author or news outlet sees fit. For instance, news outlets could bias their content by omitting information or by emphasizing some points more than others to convey the message they want. By cherry picking information, the media can essentially control how the general public will perceive the information and react. For instance, there was an article published in the Morning Call titled “Should you be concerned about the Zika virus coming to the Lehigh Valley?” (Kennedy 2016). The article gave a general summary of the virus including how Aedes aegypti is the vector, the mosquitoes’ prevalence in South America, and how people who have travelled abroad may be at risk. The information presented contained within the article is factual, but the author omitted that Pennsylvania does not have the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and, therefore, not at risk for a domestic infection. Without this last piece of information, it is very easy to believe that Zika may actually come to Pennsylvania and be vectored like it is in South America. This is just one example of how the media biases our views. …show more content…
Authors purposely choose their wording to instill a feeling in the audience; this is especially relevant for microbes, since they are often depicted in a negative light and the language used instills fear in the reader. For this reason, I choose to investigate the different word choices in articles about the Zika virus and E. coli. These two microbes provide a good point of comparison because Zika has really only been relevant in the United States in the last six months, whereas E. coli is a microbe that appears in the media on a yearly basis. Additionally, both microbes have shown an increased amount of searches on Google within the last 6 months, according to Google