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Psychological Insights on the Role and Impact of the Media During the Pandemic
Lessons from COVID-19
Barrie Gunter
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eBook - ePub
Psychological Insights on the Role and Impact of the Media During the Pandemic
Lessons from COVID-19
Barrie Gunter
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About This Book
This volume places the spotlight on the role different media and communications systems played in informing the public about the pandemic, shaping their views about what was happening and contributing to behavioural compliances with pandemic-related restrictions.
Throughout the pandemic, media coverage has played an important role in drawing attention to specific messages, influencing public risk perceptions and fear responses. Mainstream media and other electronic communication systems such as Facebook and WhatsApp have been pivotal in getting pandemic information out to the public, thereby influencing their beliefs, attitudes and behaviour and engaging them generally in the pandemic as stakeholders. In this timely volume, author Barrie Gunter considers how people reacted to this coverage and its contribution to their understanding of what was going on, including the influence of fake news and misinformation on public beliefs about the pandemic, from anti-lockdown protests to the "anti-vaxx" movement. In addition, looking at how government messaging was not always consistent or clear and how different authorities were found not always to be in harmony or compliance with the messages they put out, Gunter examines the harm done by presenting different publics with ambiguous or conflicting narratives.
Drawing out important communications strategy lessons to be learned for the future, this is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, public health and medical sciences and for policymakers who assess government strategies, responses and performance.
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Chapter 1 Pandemic, Media and the Public
DOI: 10.4324/9781003274629-1
This book will examine the roles played by the media in communicating information to communities around the world about the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, the nature of these communications and how they shaped the people's psychological responses to the crisis. In this context, the term âmediaâ refers to the traditional âmainstreamâ media including television and radio broadcasting and print media. It also refers to the vast stream of communications found via the Internet on the World Wide Web. These information sources comprised of websites operated by the major mass news media and also newer online-only sources. They also included the massive sites operated by the biggest micro-blogging and social networking companies. The best-known names here are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube, each with a global reach of hundreds of millions or even billions of people, and sites originating from, based in or operating out of China (with most of these serving Chinese users only), such as QZone, Ren Ren, Sina Weibo, TikTok, We Chat and You Ku.
The major news media were known to play potentially important roles in keeping populations informed about major outbreaks of new and established diseases long before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic (Anwar et al., 2020). News reporting can let people know about the latest developments in epidemics and more importantly teach them about the symptoms caused by a new disease and how they can minimise their chances of catching it. Scare stories can quickly circulate about new diseases especially if they have caused deaths and those deaths have occurred in or close to the communities in which people live. The media can contribute to these reactions if they give significant attention to the worst-case scenarios and most damaging outcomes. The tendency of the ânewsâ to gravitate towards the unusual can often mean that epidemic stories fail to focus sufficiently on the normal or normative. If it is the case that a new disease is relatively harmless to the great majority, but can be life-threatening to the few, the major news media will often focus on the latter (Yan et al., 2016).
The lessons learned from pre-pandemic research need to be revisited again to see whether they can be or have been re-learned. As the pandemic spread dramatically around the world during early 2020 with an initial peak in the spring of that year, followed by a second wave in many countries later the same year and in some places for a third time in 2021, national governments maintained tight restrictions over people's behaviour and introduced repeated lockdowns in which they closed down most of their economies and societies. These responses were deemed necessary to bring this highly infectious new coronavirus under control, but they were also, in many ways, as damaging to societies and individuals as the disease itself.
The traditional mass media and the newer online media became vital points of contact for most people with information sources about COVID-19. For extended periods, some national and regional government leaders and their scientific advisers broadcast daily briefings on television. Most broadcast news airtime and newspaper page space were devoted to news about the pandemic and its impact. Early coverage provided regular reminders to people of rapidly rising hospitalisation and death rates linked to COVID-19. Stories told tales of people not being allowed to visit elderly loved ones in residential care homes or family members in hospitals even if they were dying. Other reports reminded everyone that government lockdowns had forced companies out of business by compulsorily closing their premises while many employees lost their jobs and were left unable to pay their bills. Given the significance of this media coverage to national publics, what impact, if any, did it have?
The Onset of a Global Pandemic
Before considering the role and impact of media coverage during the pandemic, a major theme in this book, it is probably helpful to pause to review how it all started. At the end of December 2019, scientists in Wuhan, China identified a new disease manifesting in patients showing pneumonia-like symptoms and discovered its cause was a new coronavirus. It caused severe respiratory illness. In this respect it was similar to an earlier outbreak in 2003, that had been labelled SARS-CoV â severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus. The new virus was labelled SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 (after the year â 2019 â when it had emerged). It was less deadly than the first SARS virus, but highly infectious and over time produced many new variants of itself.
SARS-CoV-2 was originally thought to be another zoonotic virus that had originated in an animal species which then migrated into humans as result of close physical contact between people and infected animals. Case numbers escalated in and around Wuhan within weeks and started to be detected in other parts of China signalling the start of a new epidemic. SARS-CoV-2 cases quickly outstripped those of SARS-CoV.
At the outset, the Chinese medical authorities were unable to pinpoint the origin of this new viral pneumonia. By 7th January 2020, however, the cause was identified as a new coronavirus and its genomic sequence was published and shared with other countries. By 11th January, China reported its first known death from this new virus. This happened just before the big Chinese New Year's celebrations expected to involve millions of people, many of whom would travel across the country to visit relatives and friends. Further cases were reported outside China in Japan, South Korea and Thailand. Reports emerged of cases in other parts of the world, including Europe and North America across February 2020 (Taylor, 2021, 17th March).
In spite of initial claims by the Chinese authorities that they had this new disease under control, later modelling calculated that anything between 2,300 and 4,000 of its citizens may have been infected by the virus by the time China first publicly owned up to this outbreak on 31st December 2019 (McMullen, 2021, 26th January).
It was the World Health Organisation that, on 11th February 2020, labelled the virus as SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it caused as COVID-19. It soon became clear, as early cases mounted, that this new virus had a range of surface symptoms but that it primarily affected the respiratory system and could give rise to serious illness. Other organs in the body could also be damaged by the virus if it penetrated that far. Fortunately, it emerged that while it could be life-threatening to some, COVID-19's mortality rate was quite low and that most people infected by it would either be asymptomatic or experience only mild symptoms. Despite this reassuring discovery, its highly infectious nature meant that it could spread extensively and that in absolute numerical terms, those needing hospital treatment were numerous enough to put most health systems under considerable strain.
By the 30th January 2020, the World Health Organization had classed COVID-19 as a âpublic health emergency of international concernâ (World Health Organization, 2020, 30th January) Scientists around the world had been triggered into examining the nature of the virus and its symptoms and also started work on developing vaccines against it. Public health systems instigated preparations for a major disease outbreak and governments and their support administrations were placed on a higher state of alert in line with protocols for dealing with epidemics (Perlman, 2020).
Once the initial China-based epidemic evolved into a pandemic, where it infiltrated populations worldwide, it was clear that international cooperation would be needed to deal with this new disease (Kokudo & Sugiyama, 2020). This meant that experts from around the world would need to pool resources and share intelligence openly and early to expedite understanding and devise effective interventions to bring this new virus under control (Lee et al., 2020). Governments would also need to be open about the facts with the populations. The discovery that while the virus could survive on surfaces, it was principally transmitted through the air, meant that coping strategies had to evolve to deal with the problems this new disease created (Morawska & Cao, 2020).
The UK government, for example, initially advised people in media announcements to increase their personal hygiene vigilance. This included avoidance, wherever possible, of touching surfaces when out of home, regular hand washing or sanitising and advising people not to touch their face without having first thoroughly washed their hands. There was some further advice to avoid crowded spaces indoors and to try to keep a physical distance from others, unless you lived with them. As the narratives about the new disease rapidly evolved, the mass media were increasingly brought into play as the principal sources for keeping the public aware of what was going on. While media reports were useful for getting out the latest news about the pandemic, they could also generate public disquiet if they cast doubt on the ability of their government and health services to cope (Maciel-Lima et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2015).
During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, both the traditional mass media and newer online media had roles to play in getting information out to the public. It was imperative that people were aware of this new disease and how to spots its symptoms, and then knew what to do if they felt unwell and believed from their symptoms that they had COVID-19. It was also important that people received and understood official health guidance in relation to this new disease. Inevitably, as regular updates about infection rates and then death rates from COVID-19 started became more prominent on the mainstream news, there were questions about how this coverage might influence people's personal risk perceptions and also trigger associated anxiety and fear responses. With frightening death rates projections being published in March 2020, the eventual locking down of societies and economies meant that many people were dramatically suspended from their usual work routines either through orders to work from home or because they lost their job. This created a climate of uncertainty and worry that over time could potentially trigger damaging health consequences.
The tone of much media coverage in the early days â and sometimes later on as well â was dire. No finite time frame could be placed on the duration of the pandemic and this only served to generate further uncertainty and anxiety. Hence, the media coverage of the pandemic, though in so many ways essential, could also relay information that caused considerable psychological distress for many people (Garfin et al., 2020).
It was already known that persistent and acute stress could be very damaging to people's long-term health. An extremely stressful event such as the attacks on the United States of 11th September 2001 could shape the risk perceptions, anxiety levels and subsequent loss of confidence and hope across populations with long-lasting and damaging consequences to the national psyche. These profound and potentially damaging psychological responses could have long-term implications for public health (Garfin et al., 2018).
Pandemics and the Media
The virus underpinning the COVID-19 pandemic was first publicly noticed in December 2019 and then during the first three months of 2020 spread rapidly around the world and across the world's news agendas. It emerged initially as a matter of potential international concern, and then as a clear and present danger to virtually every nation. Many societies, distant from where the virus was first noticed in central China looked on, via news media reports, initially with some degree of complacency, dismissing this new viral outbreak as yet another âAsianâ disease (like SARS and MERS before it) that probably would not reach their shores (Cheung, 2020, 21st March). This initial reaction turned into nervousness as it reached Europe and North America and then Australia and into full-blown panic once it began to infect indigenous populations and news about rapidly rising hospitalisation rates surfaced and then the first reports of deaths.
The major news media around the world filled their news schedules with COVID-19 stories. News coverage underlined the multi-faceted issues triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. There was the disease itself and concerns about how many people could become seriously ill or die once infected. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, there was additional concern about how much this new disease would stretch the resources of the health services.
There was evidence that news organisations initially held back from reporting on death rates even as they rose. A study of Italian media interpreted this finding as indicative of a degree of âdeath denialâ in the nation's news. This might have been motivated by a wish not to alarm people unduly. At the same time, there were still many unknowns about this new ...