The Zika virus crisis during the 2016 Rio Olympic Games: a media cover analysis

During times of crisis, media coverage increases significantly, shaping public opinion and creating images of the places where these events occur. In this context, this paper analyses the Zika virus epidemic in Brazil, a past crisis that gained increased media attention during the months leading up to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, to identify the cognitive and affective components of published information. To this end, we subjected 1034 headlines (from digital editions of leading Spanish daily newspapers) related to tourism security at the Olympic Games to content analysis and employed a series of attributes to approach the cognitive and affective components of the information analysed. The results reveal that alarmist and negative headlines are more frequent when security issues, particularly citizen security, are reported. News headlines about the Olympic Games are generally descriptive and more positive. In the field of health security, citation-type headlines—those citing information provided by experts or authorities—are used more frequently. By analysing a past crisis, this study has several implications for Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) dealing with such events. In this context, we highlight some good practices to maximise informative news and minimise alarmist ones.