Stooges of the system or holistic observers?

Quandt Thorsten, Boberg Svenja, Schatto-Eckrodt Tim, Frischlich Lena

Research article (book contribution)

Abstract

News media frequently cover crisis situations, from military conficts, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks to large-scale efects of man-made accidents. Some of these are unexpected and practically without a build-up (like the Chernobyl disaster or 9/11), but some of them evolve (like hurricane seasons), and some fall somewhere in-between (like structural conficts between nations that lead to sudden military actions). For most types of crises (Nord & Strömbäck, 2006), journalism has developed specifc routines and practices (e.g., Olsson & Nord, 2015). Preparation and rules, as well as rituals (Durham, 2008; Riegert & Olsson, 2007) help in dealing with unexpected events or unfolding situations that fall outside the coverage of "normal" times. Part of this is driven by informational goals that are inherent to journalism, but part of it is an urge to establish authority in societal communication under non-normal conditions (ibid.). The coronavirus crisis, however, seems to have caught many news organizations of-guard; the coverage during the initial spread of the virus in early 2020 was scarce (see also Boberg et al., 2020) and many news media around the globe made the false assessment that the outbreak would either not afect countries other than China or that the virus was less dangerous than the fu (e.g., Henry & Hauck, 2020). Coverage did not take of until the consequences for the respective nations became apparent and experiential. When the virus and its efects reached the national populations, though, the news output on the virus threat seemed to explode, and journalism switched to full "crisis mode." Critics, including journalism researchers, noted multiple issues with this reaction, identifying defcits in the coverage and journalism's functioning. In the case of Germany, which is the country of analysis of this chapter, communication scholars noted a limited set of expert voices and "court circular"1 for some media ( Jarren, 2020), a lack of distance and critique, not enough variance, and "horse-race reporting" with regard to national comparisons of infection numbers (Meier & Wyss, 2020). Many of these critical observers found the coverage to be too close to the actions of the political elite and in unquestioned support of governmental decisions. The anecdotal evidence has yet to be tested against empirical research, and it remains to be seen whether there is support for the more general observation of previous research that the coverage in crisis situations turns to "pseudo-journalism" (Nord & Strömbäck, 2006, p. 105) and "reporting more, informing less" (ibid., p. 85), i.e., a systemic failure. To address this research interest, we will analyze the posts of journalistic media on Facebook during the frst nine months of the coronavirus crisis in Germany, using various forms of computational content analysis. In particular, we will focus on the presence of (political) elite actors: how they were connected to specifc topics and strategic roles in the coverage, and how this has changed during the various phases of the pandemic. The choice of Facebook news is deliberate: virtually all journalistic media in the country do ofer neartime news via their Facebook channels, so this is a useful tool for observing the news fow. By analyzing the news items there, we can give a comprehensive overview of the crisis response of the journalistic system in one country (i.e., it serves as an indicator of what is covered in news media in general). Furthermore, Facebook is also used as a primary news source by many users, and as such, it is a highly relevant distribution channel for news media in its own right: 21% of the German population above the age of 14 use it daily (in contrast to highly researched Twitter, which is only used by 2%) (Beisch et al., 2019). Before turning to the analysis, though, we will briefy recap previous research on crisis journalism and its relations to political actions.

Details zur Publikation

Publisher: van Aelst Peter, Blumler Jay
Book title: Political Communication in the Time of Coronavirus
Release year: 2021
Publishing company: Routledge
Language in which the publication is written: English