Covid 19 and Mass Media News Sources

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Covid-19 has made a great impact not only in the United States but around the world. It has been over a year now since the pandemic began and we were all locked in our houses 7 days out of the week. Now, more and more news arises that only seems to make people feel worse about the situation. This includes the news of the more contagious strain of Covid-19 that has begun to make its way across the United States and many others that seem to be coming out daily. Even with the monumental impact that the corona virus has caused this country, many Americans seem to feel lost about what is going on and what to believe when new corona virus information becomes available. Since the pandemic began, there has been a massive amount of back and forth between individuals about what is going on in our country when it comes to Covid-19. I was curious as to why it seemed that so many people had such differing opinions about the Covid-19 crisis. While searching, I found an article posted by CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) titled "Trust in Covid-19 info sources by demographics, beliefs." This article goes over the differences of beliefs about the corona virus based on the news source consumed by the individual. This article states that, based off of the information provided throughout the article, individuals that watched CNN or MSNBC had more belief that Covid-19 is dangerous and a bigger deal than the government is making it out to be, when compared to their Fox News watching counter parts. Fox News viewers more often tended to believe that Covid-19 has been drastically exaggerated and that the corona virus was used as a terroristic act.    

This article only touches the surface of Covid-19 misinformation as well as the divisiveness this virus has brought along with it. However this article does show that news media sources such as: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and more, are one of the many reasons for this issue to become as bad as it has over the past year. 

 This picture does not deal with the differing views of news networks when talking about the corona virus. I just wanted to show how much mass media news network viewership increased at the beginning of the pandemic.

Source:

Beusekom, Mary Van. “Trust in COVID Info Sources Varies by Demographics, Beliefs.” CIDRAP, 14 Oct. 2020, www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/10/trust-covid-info-sources-varies-demographics-beliefs.


 

Comments

  1. Dasha Gorenshteyn-Fact Check AddictionFebruary 12, 2021 at 10:17 AM

    Super insightful blog post this week, Dylan. It is quite bizarre how politically polarized this virus has become in the United States even though every other nation in the world was dealing with the same, if not more serious effects of the virus almost a year ago now. I liked how you included visuals and charts in your post as it made it easier to follow!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kelly Norton @ Contrasting CoverageFebruary 22, 2021 at 9:36 PM

    I really enjoyed the visuals accompanied by your blog post! This topic is very interesting, indeed. It sort of ties in with my blog, in which I discuss the differences in how Fox News, NBC, and CNN report the news. It pretty much falls in line with what I have discovered on my blog, in that Fox News viewers see things far differently than other viewers. Your statement, "Fox News viewers more often tended to believe that Covid-19 has been drastically exaggerated and that the corona virus was used as a terroristic act," is very much align with the observation I have made about Fox News audience members only believing things that Fox News tells them. In a previous discussion in class, Professor DeWitt posted a PEJ factsheets, and one of the factsheets highlighted facts about Fox News. I touched on it in my blog, but the fact that I learned that most resinates with this post is the fact: "Republicans trust Fox News more than any other outlet. Democrats distrust it more than any other outlet."65% of Republicans say they trust Fox News for political and election news, and less than 1/3 of Republicans say they trust ANY other news organizations such as ABC, CBS, and NBC news. This can explain the huge disconnect highlighting the reason why Fox News viewers discount the coronavirus more than other viewers. This was a great post. I will continue to check your blog and am looking forward to the next post!

    ReplyDelete

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