Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the international media, the SARS virus was the next big story after the Iraq War. As SARS spread quickly around the world via Hong Kong, the medical, social, economic and political aspects of the disease were the subjects of extensive media coverage. At the outset, the lack of information about the virus led to some highly sensational reporting. This situation was compounded by the fact that SARS originated in China, where the government's penchant for secrecy made it hard to get at the facts. Early reports were often incomplete and raised many worrisome questions. However, despite criticisms that the media was fear mongering, intense and highly critical international reporting helped pressure the Chinese Government to be more transparent about the outbreak. For the Hong Kong media, SARS was one of the biggest news stories ever. The local media played a special role in the reporting of the outbreak worldwide, as it was only when SARS hit Hong Kong in late February 2003 that it received international attention. Unlike mainland China, Hong Kong enjoys freedom of expression and freedom of the press, factors that enabled both the local and the international media to report on the domestic situation as Hong Kong emerged as the epicentre of the worldwide SARS outbreak and provide the global community with information about the new disease. The SARS outbreak showed that a free media is vital in a crisis situation and in keeping the authorities honest. While there have been criticisms that the media "hyped" the outbreak and exaggerated its effect, it should remembered that the initial sensational reporting had much to do with the novelty of the disease and the lack of information from mainland authorities. This chapter starts by examining how the international media reported the outbreak in Hong Kong, which in turn shaped public perceptions worldwide. It goes on to discuss the HKSAR Government's shortcomings in handling communication with the media and takes a look at the various roles played by the local media during the crisis. It notes, for example, how the Hong Kong media defended press freedom when it saw this being threatened by the government's attempt to pass new national security legislation under Article 23 of the Basic Law. It continues by comparing how SARS was reported in Hong Kong and Toronto in order to draw insights about the differences between the two societies. Finally, the media's situation in mainland China is discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".