Constructive Journalism in the Face of a Crisis: The Effects of Social Media News Updates About COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic brought along with it concerns about anxiety, racial bias, and pushback against public health recommendations, all of which are intensified by the news and social media. This study investigated the effects of constructive journalism in the context of this crisis, by randomly assigning 492 subjects to view simulated social media news updates with different headlines and images. The results showed positive and constructive headlines led to less anger and anxiety than negative headlines. The sanitization of graphic images decreased anger, anxiety, COVID-19 risk perceptions, and anti-Chinese sentiment—a relationship that was mediated by anger and anxiety. These findings suggest constructive journalism can be useful in times of crisis, and that its visual aspect warrants more scholarly attention. Further, these results shed new light on the effects of news exposure via social media in times of crisis, and how this impact depends on specific attributes of the headlines and images of the content being shared. The findings are discussed in relation to the theory of affective intelligence and recent concerns about how news and social media influence the public in times of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective intelligence
• anger
• anxiety
• constructive journalism
• COVID-19
• graphicness
• prejudice‌
• social media

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Natalie Jomini Stroud, the Center for Media Engagement team, Morten Skovsgaard, Emily Rubin, Robert Richardson, and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Data Availability Statement

The dataset generated for this project is available for replication from the author.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A series of ANOVAs and Chi-squared tests showed that there were no significant differences between the groups, with regards to demographic factors (gender, age, race, income, education), the subjects’ personal experience with the virus (i.e., whether they, their family members, or any of their acquaintances had tested positive for COVID-19), or how closely they had followed COVID-19 news before the study.

2 As a robustness check, all the analyses reported in this article were also conducted using the full sample. All the results remain unchanged in terms of direction and significance regardless of whether the eight subjects who missed the attention check are included or removed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants to the Center for Media Engagement by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund.