Journalists’ questions during crisis

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, various institutions held press conferences to inform the public about the situation. Journalists engaged in these events to obtain information and to scrutinize the appropriateness of authorities’ measures. Previous research has shown that journalists have become more adversarial towards politicians, but also that health crises make journalists more cooperative with authorities to help manage the situation. However, it remains unknown to what extent journalists retain their deliberative aim in press conferences where crises are addressed, and how their interventions as a whole shape discussions with authorities. A corpus of twenty-one press conferences held by seven institutions was annotated according to the argumentative moves of journalists. Results show that journalists displayed a wide array of argumentative moves, and the findings suggest that journalists incline towards retrieving information during crises, unless the situation gets intertwined with political turmoil.