Language used to describe measles in the press has altered significantly over the last sixty years, a shift that reflects changing perceptions of the disease within the medical community as well as broader changes in public health discourse. California, one of the most populous U.S. states and seat of the 2015 measles outbreak originating at Disneyland, presents an opportunity for observing these changes. This article offers a longitudinal case study of five decades of measles news coverage by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, which represented two of the largest news markets in California when the measles vaccine was released, in 1963, and during the 2015 outbreak. Measles reporting during this period displays patterns pointing to an active role for journalists in shaping public understanding of health and medical matters, especially as they recede from public memory, through the employment of available and circulating political and cultural frames. Moreover, journalistic frames in this period of reporting incorporated presentist descriptions of the disease, which imposed present values on the medical past, and which were constructed of decontextualized historical references that supported prevailing contemporary notions of the disease. Framing and the tendency toward presentism, in the context of shifting public health discourse, had the effect of communicating an increasingly severe sounding disease over time, and of shifting blame for that disease’s spread from nature to government to individuals. Journalistic framing and causal stories have much power to shape public understanding of medical matters as they recede from public memory.

在过去的 60 年中，媒体上用于描述麻疹的语言发生了显着变化，这一转变反映了医学界对该疾病的看法不断变化以及公共卫生话语的更广泛变化。加利福尼亚州是美国人口最多的州之一，也是 2015 年源自迪斯尼乐园的麻疹疫情爆发地，为观察这些变化提供了机会。本文提供了洛杉矶时报和旧金山纪事报五个十年麻疹新闻报道的纵向案例研究，它代表了 1963 年和 2015 年麻疹疫苗发布期间和 2015 年爆发麻疹疫苗时加利福尼亚州最大的两个新闻市场。这一时期的麻疹报道显示出的模式表明，记者在塑造公众对健康和医疗问题的理解方面发挥着积极作用，特别是当他们从公众记忆中消失时，通过使用现有和流通的政治和文化框架。此外，这一报道时期的新闻框架包含了对疾病的现代主义描述，这些描述将当前价值强加于医学过去，并且由支持当代流行疾病概念的脱离背景的历史参考构成。在公共卫生话语转变的背景下，框架和呈现主义的趋势，随着时间的推移，传播一种听起来越来越严重的疾病，并将这种疾病从自然传播到政府到个人的责任推卸给了个人。新闻框架和因果故事具有很大的影响力来塑造公众对医疗问题的理解，因为它们已从公众记忆中消失。