A Research on Perceptions of Health News of Individuals Who Lived in Istanbul in the COVID-19 Process

Introduction

Nowadays, in tandem with the coronavirus pandemic importance of the right health communication and health news are increasing day by day. It is believed that perceptions of health news of people are affected due to communication tools such as social media, television and internet. Especially in Istanbul, city that is seen as Wuhan of Turkey, people follow health news and epidemic information via media and social media. However, this situation may be given rise to troubles like disinformation, misinformation and infodemic. For this reason, it is believed that exact information flow and media perception is crucial.

Most people including doctors and scientists have been taught primarily from the development of social media in the health sector. Press coverage with medical stories in the media is generally failure, superficial and sensational news (Shuchman&Wilkes, 1997, pp.76). By the way, it is explained that the media is required to avoid sensational news, not publishing news that gives false hopes for people or news which is a desperate person (Rigel, 2000, pp. 246). As a consequence of, it can be associated with news changes to meet more rankings or assess the temporary tariff media to act.

Covid-19 is a new type of virus which affects the whole world. This can be spread quickly and sustainably because Covid-19 is an infectious disease. It is diagnosed with fever, dry cough, malaise and Dispnea as a symptom of this disease (Liu et al., 2020, pp.1). The World Health Organization (2020) was announced by Covid-19 as a pandemic in March 2020. Who mentioned that people caused worries and sadness listening, reading and watching about Covid-19 news. Porat et al. (2020, pp.1). stated that people has needed to long-term strategies, sustainable behaviour changes and motivation for well-being and sanitary living conditions during Covid-19 pandemic.

At the same time, Gao clarified that social media produced excessive false information and mental illness (2020, pp.2). In this sense, it can be explained by the mediation concept of Rigel. Rigel argues that there are two broad categories of mediating news. Firstly, in the process of mediation the news of the process of information to knowledge, from the source to the actor, from the event to the story, from relevance to entertainment. On the second level of the news associates with publishing policies, the level of technology use, media organizational structure (2000, pp.180). Moreover, according to Molyneux and Holton, health journalists uses filtration-based methods for social desires, selective memory and other errors. (2015, pp.238). In addition, it has been stated that social media can bring excessive false information loads and can also cause mental illness (Gao et al., 2020, pp.2).It has been revealed that with the development of communication technology, the use area, scope, speed and access to media access has developed, and the ability of social media to provide extensive sharing and portability reduce the speed of communication to seconds (Peltekoğlu, 2016, pp.331).

The purpose of this study was to measure individual perceptions individuals over the age of 18 who lived in Istanbul about current health news, when the coronavirus pandemic experienced. The sample of this study was limited to adults over the age of 18 who lived in Istanbul. The literature section is limited to topics like health communication, protection motivation theory. In this study aimed at measuring the Covid-19 pandemic of the most intense and at the same time it was the most populous city of Istanbul for taking their samples and perceptions of their health news Coronavirus Istanbul in Turkey.