Making sense of the COVID-19 crisis: information-seeking practices and attitudes towards information providers among Baltic audiences

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a comparative cross-country survey and qualitative interview data, this article explores audiences’ information-seeking practices and sentiments related to news media and other information providers in Estonia and Latvia during the COVID-19 crisis. It concludes that members of both the ethno-linguistic majority and the Russian-speaking minority relied primarily on their social network and local experts to make sense of the pandemic, with media playing a rather moderate role. Russian speakers reoriented their news media repertoires away from Russian television toward local news providers. Despite popular sentiments of media skepticism in both countries, audiences in Estonia express more confidence in local news media. Alongside ethno-linguistic divides, the study illuminates socio-economic rifts in media-society relations.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• media audiences
• news media repertoires
• trust in media
• media skepticism
• Russian-speaking minority
• Russian television
• public media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

List of interviews cited

Andrei, Riga, 2021 (age 49)

Anna, Riga, 2021 (age 37)

Nikita, Tallinn, 2020 (age 19)

Tatjana, Tallinn, 2020 (age 74)

Tatjana, Tallinn, 2021 (age 75)

Vladimir, Tallinn, 2020 (age 48)

Vladimir, Tallinn, 2021 (age 49)

Vyacheslav, Tallinn, 2020 (age 46)

Yekaterina, Riga, 2021 (age 33)

Nikita, Tallinn, 2020 (age 19)

Nikita, Tallinn, 2021 (age 20)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council (grant no. PUT1624) and the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies through a Research Grant for Emerging Scholars.

Notes on contributors

Jānis Juzefovičs

Jānis Juzefovičs is a senior researcher at Rīga Stradiņš University. His research interests focus on the study of media audiences in the Baltics. He obtained a PHD in media and communication studies from the University of Westminster in 2014. Before joining Rīga Stradiņš University, he worked on a University of Tartu research project examining Russian-speaking audiences’ civic identity and transnational (digital) media practices in Latvia and Estonia during times of geopolitical uncertainty. Juzefovičs is the author of Broadcasting and National Imagination in Post-Communist Latvia: Defining the Nation, Defining Public Television (Bristol: Intellect, 2017).