My pandemic news is better than yours: audience perceptions of early news coverage about Covid-19

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on how American audiences perceived news coverage during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. Through a survey-experiment of news consumers (N = 767) over a three-day period in mid-March 2020, this study shows that citizens had positive attitudes toward their own Covid-19 news sources, but were critical about the news sources others were using to get information about the virus. Data reveal evidence of presumed media influence, where audiences believed others’ health behaviors were being influenced by pandemic news.

KEYWORDS:

• Presumed media influence
• media perceptions
• perceived news habits
• third-person effect
• first-person effect
• presumed behavior

Disclosure statement

I wish to confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest associated with this publication and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.

Supplementary material

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