The Effects of the COVID-19 “Infodemic” on Journalistic Content and News Feed in Online and Offline Communication Spaces

Abstract

The systematic coverage of the coronavirus pandemic by the Greek mass media began in February 2020, specifically, from the time the virus made its appearance in the most significant way in Italy. Until then, news about the virus had been sporadically visible depending mainly on news reports coming from the international media and press agencies. The assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic as an “infodemic” by the World Health Organization (WHO) made obvious the need to study media coverage and map its patterns, along with the unprecedented political and social response and the massive consequences on the global economy. Through a large content analysis, containing 7457 news items from 13 different media outlets, plus a comparative Twitter analysis of 36,317 tweets, we took the present situation as an opportunity to collect real-time data but also as a point of departure for addressing issues connected to journalistic practices and technological changes in the framework of COVID-19. According to our findings, the Greek media faced the crisis “with a view to the world”, emphasizing international coverage, giving priority to the authorities and scientists, and keeping (at least in their majority) hoaxes and conspiracy theories out of the agenda.

Constructing Selves in (Im)mobility: Greek Women’s Narratives Concerning the COVID-19 Lockdowns in Athens, Greece

“…The security offered by the house became even more significant as images appeared through scientists, TV, and news websites showing the health of the outside world, extending far beyond Greece’s borders, to be under threat. Greece’s media, the main source of information for Greek people during the pandemic (Scarpa and Garoufallou 2021), did not suffer from an “infodemic” but faced the crisis “with a view to the world”: They emphasized international coverage, and gave priority to the authorities and scientists, keeping (at least in their majority) hoaxes and conspiracy theories out of the agenda (Kostarella and Kotsakis 2002).…”

Theory and Applications of Web 3.0 in the Media Sector

“…As a result, the advanced technological framework unlocks various data exploitation capabilities, leading to higher functional levels. For instance, newsroom automations can expedite Web-Radio/-TV services with innumerous live streaming and post-processing augmentations [22,23], while they can also provide framing insights for better organizing blogs and news online [24] or data monitoring and gathering options for post-analysis purposes [25,26].…”

“…Contemporary Semantic Web and Big Data technologies are continuously elaborated to advance multimodal data analysis concerning information classification, semantic conceptualization and contextualization, content validation, and management automations, which can be primarily deployed in the sensitive news and media domains [1][2][3][4]16,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. These modular automation and augmentation layers can fuel interaction mechanisms between corporations, machines, and individuals to accelerate crowdsourcing procedures for constructing and maintaining suitable media repositories [16,18,27,29].…”