Do the first 10 days equal a year? Comparing two Canadian public health risk events using the national media

It has been suggested that the way in which a risk event is presented within the first 10 days of media coverage provides the major frames that will dominate news media presentations of any new information about the event over time. A media content analysis for two prominent Canadian health risk events (the E. coli water contamination event in Walkerton, Ontario, in 2000 and the discovery of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or Mad Cow Disease in a cow in Alberta in 2003) in a major national newspaper was used to examine this hypothesis. For both case studies, the story frames in the first 10 days of coverage were not significantly different than during a full 1-year period following the event, indicating that a 10 day analysis should be sufficient to determine media presentations of the risk events. The increased accessibility of information during this period (as indicated by the greater number of articles on the front page of the newspaper) reinforces the usefulness of looking at the first 10 days to establish dominant frames. However, the 10 day analysis is only reliable for a risk event that remains relatively constant over time provided that media coverage remains high for an extended period and that no new salient issues emerge.