What was and is the quality of journalistic reporting on the corona pandemic? The study “One-sided, uncritical, close to the government?”, conducted by communication and media researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, provides initial results. The project is funded by the Rudolf Augstein Foundation and the bidt.
Study
The team, led by Prof. Dr. Marcus Maurer (University of Mainz) and Prof. Dr. Carsten Reinemann (LMU), is investigating the quality of reporting by eleven leading media in Germany – including online news sites and television news.
More than 5,000 articles were analysed for this purpose in a period from January 2020 to April 2021 based on six dimensions:
- Relevance
- Diversity
- Objectivity/neutrality
- Accuracy/factuality
- Balance
- Classification/contextualisation.
The researchers came to the following conclusions, among others:
- The media studied reported less on the second Corona wave than on the first.
- Information about the Corona virus itself was too little.
- Economic and psychosocial consequences of the pandemic were successively covered less and less.
- The reporting tended to focus one-sidedly on medical experts
