Abstract

Access to health-safe water is a key factor in the proper functioning of entire societies. At the same time, water can be an easy carrier of life-threatening microorganisms or chemicals that may find their way there accidentally or intentionally, e.g. as a result of a sabotage. All this makes threats to the water supply system a socially relevant topic in media communication and requires sensitivity and journalistic ethics. The aim of this paper is to analyze press communication related to the Legionellapneumophila water poisoning that took place in the Podkarpackie Voivodeship in August and September 2023, in terms of criteria such as sentiment, understandability, and frequency of specific keywords. These criteria provide an answer to the question of whether the press representation of this event can be seen as „ethical”. For this purpose, a corpus analysis of 203 press articles on the Legionellapneumophila outbreak, published by popular news portals in Poland at the time of the event, was carried out.