Covid reporting has improved perceptions of the media, survey suggests

Friday, 26 March 2021

The Covid pandemic may have improved appreciation for the media as people place more weight on “reliable” information, NPA finds.

The news media has a bigger place in people’s lives post-Covid, according to research commissioned by the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.

Just over half of people polled for the NPA said they were engaging more with news websites and apps than they were a year ago.

Seventy-two per cent said newspapers and news media were highly important to them in the wake of Covid and 67 per cent agreed they were an important element of the social fabric of New Zealand, the NPA reported.

The poll of 1225 adults was conducted in early-to-mid March.

Televised media stand-ups have given people more of a window into the world of journalists and sometimes made them seem aggressive, Massey University lecturer Catherine Strong says.

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Massey University journalism lecturer Catherine Strong agreed that, anecdotally, trust in the media appeared to have improved in New Zealand, if not in the United States.

That reflected how dangerous “conspiracy theories” were during a time of pandemic, she said.

“It is so obvious now there is lots of misinformation out there.

“There is a collective downfall in allowing that to perpetrate and the average person can see that and know that.

“We are in a ‘life and death’ situation where real information makes a difference.”

Trust in the media had gone hand-in-hand with a perception the pandemic had been well-handled here, she said.

Low points included “shock jocks trying to be smart” and a failure by the media on some occasions to quickly challenge seemingly questionable information provided by officials that later turned out to be inaccurate, she said.

The latter included some false reassurances provided by health officials about the activities of some Covid patients’ during community outbreaks, she said.

Live-streamed press conferences had given people more insight into the way journalists did their jobs and had sometimes made them look “crass from outside”, she said.

“They usually see polished, highly-edited interviews and may not have seen that journalists have to poke a lot to get to the facts sometimes and they can’t do it by being polite all the time.

“Usually that’s not seen by the public. They may not have seen how hard it is to get the facts sometimes.”