Journalists during COVID-19: Perceptions of Negative Impacts on Portuguese Journalism

Newswork in crisis: Sourcing patterns during COVID-19 through a ‘lived experience’ perspective

“…There are four significant findings that emerge from the analysis: the first is that the results of the present study meet the conclusions of other similar research arguing for the dominance of political sources in COVID-19 coverage (e.g., Araújo et al, 2023;Bernaola-Serrano and Aguado-Guadalupe, 2022;Litvinenko et al, 2022;Mellado et al, 2021). Journalists in both Greece and Cyprus admit their over-reliance on authoritative sources, and particularly on political sources and information generated by special national committes and medical experts appointed to manage the pandemic.…”

“…In line with relevant work (e.g., Araújo et al, 2023;Litvinenko et al, 2022;Bernaola-Serrano and Aguado-Guadalupe, 2022;Trifonova Price and Antonova, 2022), we argue that global journalism failed to cater for the needs of an informed citizenry as the national framework of news production hampered the informational potential of today's news ecology (Volkmer and Firdaus, 2013) allowing traditional institutional players to dominate the narration of the crisis. Journalism itself was put in a 'cautious mode' that hindered its capacity and willingness to freely use and interact with a maltitude of sources in order to explain the pandemic and its consequences.…”

“…On the one hand, they felt the responsibility to provide relevant and useful information to help people comprehend the ongoing crisis. On the other hand, epistemic uncertainty around COVID-19 (Dunwoody, 2020), growing disinformation circulating in the global public sphere (Siapera, 2022) along with a global trend to provide politicised coverage (Araújo et al, 2023;Litvinenko et al, 2022) put journalism in a 'cautious mode' hindering journalism's capacity and willingness to scrutinise authorities and exploit available data and sources to offer critical and constructive reporting. Especially in regard to misinformation journalists sought 'to mitigate the forces challenging their work as they sought to reverse the flow of misinformation' (Perreault and Perreault, 2021: 976).…”