Charles L. Briggs is Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, and the author or coauthor of ten books.
Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, was the National Coordinator of the Dengue Fever Program in Venezuela's Ministry of Health and is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of
Charles L. Briggs is Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, and the author or coauthor of ten books.
Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, was the National Coordinator of the Dengue Fever Program in Venezuela's Ministry of Health and is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of
Heroes, Bureaucrats, and Ancient Wisdom: Journalists Cover an Epidemic Conflict
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Published:May 2016
2016. "Heroes, Bureaucrats, and Ancient Wisdom: Journalists Cover an Epidemic Conflict", Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, Charles L. Briggs, Clara Mantini-Briggs
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Scholars have often discussed the content of news coverage of epidemics but seldom have documented the complex interactions between health and media professionals, politicians, social movement organizations, and laypersons that prompt and shape it. This chapter traces local newspaper coverage of the epidemic in February 2008 and the national and international reporting of August. It focuses first on a reporter for Notidiario, Delta Amacuro's principal newspaper, who worked closely with regional public health officials, charting the newspaper's shift from a story of a mysterious disease and indigenous protests to official reassurance that the diseases were "normal" diarrheas and had been brought under control. Then we follow a leading national health reporter as she produces daily newspaper and radio stories on indigenous leadership in the epidemic, only to fall back—even as her reporting grows more deep and intimate—into cultural reasoning that reproduces stereotypes of indigenous Venezuelans.
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