‘Assessing my risk and that of my whānau is my right’: a longitudinal media analysis of risk and COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand news media

Abstract

Risk identification has been at the heart of media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Less consideration has been paid to the way that the media itself has (re)produced these risk categories, and how this has changed over the course of the pandemic. The aim of this article is to understand how risk has been constructed in the Aotearoa, New Zealand news media over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reports findings from a longitudinal media analysis of mainstream news media articles (n = 388) published in the first week of March 2020, March 2021 and March 2022. Underpinned by a socio-cultural theoretical understanding of risk, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of the 22 most relevant articles from a week of coverage during each month of March. Our analysis identified three key themes by which we characterise the discussions of risk as these developed from 2020 to 2022: (1) Subjects of risk; (2) Spaces of risk; and (3) The nation facing risk. We conclude that the dominant frame surrounding risk was one of mutual risk and solidarity. We suggest future policies around pandemic risk mitigation must attend to both the range of competing risks as well as the different epistemologies (including scientific and indigenous worldviews) informing risk. We suggest that researchers, policy makers and reporters involve the voices of those ‘at risk’ into their publications. This analysis shows the value of taking a sociocultural analysis of risk as it is framed within a particular national-cultural context.

Keywords:

• Risk construction
• presumed vulnerability
• Indigenous knowledge
• nation-making
• mundane risks
• risk spatialisation

Introduction

Risk identifications have been at the centre of health strategies to curb the COVID-19 pandemic globally, with some going as far to describe the pandemic as a ‘complex mega risk’(Nygren & Olofsson, 2020, p. 1033). In their influential report, the Royal Society (1992, p. 2) defined risk broadly as ‘the probability of a particular adverse event occurring during a stated period of time or resulting from a particular challenge’. Initially the risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic focused specifically on biological risks, such as likelihood of mortality or mortality outcomes from contracting COVID-19 (Lu et al., 2020). Over the course of the pandemic, debates around risk have expanded to consider the economic (Sukharev, 2020), social and psychological risks (Morgan et al., 2023) as well as broad public health related risks around vaccine up-take (Prickett et al., 2021).

The news media have remained a key source of public health messaging around risk throughout the pandemic (Beattie & Priestley, 2021). Evidence shows that, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, the public used news media to intensely monitor and make sense of the health crisis (Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2021). The media have been identified as playing a central role in shaping people’s ‘risk consciousness’, both in general (Beck, 1992) and more specifically about COVID-19 (Joshi & Swarnakar, 2021; Wang & Mao, 2021). News media have played an important role in framing risk in previous public health crises as they often operate as ‘first-line responders’ swiftly ‘crystallising the feelings of a nation’ (Rupar, 2020, p. 1) and shaping public morale. In doing so they offer ‘affective repertoires’ for coping with and responding to risk (Cottingham & Fisher, 2017, p. 3). News coverage of public health crises is often rooted in judgements about the social value of the victims and conceptions of social distance and difference couched in broader societal and cultural metanarratives (Tierney et al., 2006). For example, during the MERS epidemic in Saudi Arabia the media were considered a key facilitator in perpetuating negative stigma towards those with the disease (Al Knawy et al., 2019), whereas Haitian media were attributed with destigmatising HIV/AIDs by highlighting cases of unlikely sufferers (Stevens & Hull, 2013).

Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that risk has been framed in some national contexts in ways which have tended to reproduce existing social inequalities and stigma (Barreneche, 2020; Joshi & Swarnakar, 2021). Indigenous scholars have raised concerns that nationwide one-size-fits-all COVID-19 public health responses and risk communication and risk communication have exacerbated health inequities for indigenous and ethnically minoritized people who were already facing poorer access to health care and living with poorer health (McLeod et al., 2020; Pihama & Lipsham, 2020). Disability scholars and gerontologists argued that ascribing risk to already marginalised groups constituted ‘ontological violence’, which they defined as the social discounting of certain individuals or groups as either being not fully human or as having lives less worthy than others (Abrams & Abbott, 2020; Liddiard, 2020, p. 1). These scholars contend that deploying the medical language of ‘pre-existing’ and ‘underlying health conditions’ as a shorthand for death-prone has justified the institutional rationing of potentially live-saving hospital admissions and medical care to these groups (Liddiard, 2020). Some evidence suggests that these explicit and implicit forms of (de)valuing some groups also resulted in ‘vulnerable’ people internalising their at-risk and lower valued position and therefore not asking for help during this period (Morgan et al., 2022). Brown (2020; 2021) has argued for further research that situates risk within its specific cultural and national contexts to better understand how inequality has been (re)produced through changing understandings of pandemic risk.

Context

The national government response

This study aims to understand how risk was framed in the national Aotearoa, New Zealand (NZ) news media over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. NZ was selected because the government’s ‘go hard and go early’ approach has been described as one of the most risk averse public health responses internationally but also one of the most humane (Mazey & Richardson, 2020), with only 21 deaths in the first year of the pandemic amongst a population of 5 million (Msemburi et al., 2023). Following the first outbreak of COVID-19 in late February 2020 the NZ government introduced a four-tier system that was underpinned by an elimination strategy towards COVID-19 virus transmission, which involved a high level of public support and commitment (see Table 1). The national borders were closed from March 2020 until July 2022. Public health measures involved a series of four lockdowns, the first nationwide lockdown was from 26 March to 27 May 2020. A final nationwide lockdown occurred from August-December 2021. Under lockdowns, people were only allowed to leave their homes for essential business, including daily exercise. Schools, most businesses and community venues were required to close. There were restrictions on large public gatherings and requirements to wear masks in public spaces which remained until early 2022. Ease and elimination of restrictions were partially contingent on the widespread uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine, which was initially introduced in 2021 (Ministry of Health New Zealand, 2022; Prickett et al., 2021).

Table 1. New Zealand’s 4 Level COVID-19 alert system.

NZ COVID-19 alert levels	Work/Businesses	Public transport	Social gatherings	Public venues/educational facilities	Travel
Level 4- eliminate Virus is not contained in community	Essential services only for example, health, borders, supermarkets	Severely limited to essential workers only and maximum number of patrons	All social gatherings banned	All public venues and educational facilities closed. Distance/online learning only	Only essential personal movement and doing essential work
Level 3-restrict Heightened risk that virus is not contained	Businesses can open, with contactless precautions	Severely limited with physical distancing and maximum number of patrons	Gatherings of up to 10 allowed only for weddings, funerals and tangihanga (Māori funeral)	Early learning centres for essential workers children, open with maximum of 10 per ‘bubble’. Distance/online learning available	Limited to your local area only
Level 2-reduce Disease is contained, but risks of community transmission growing	Businesses open with physical distancing precautions and maximum number of patrons	Limited with physical distancing	Gatherings of up to 100 in indoor and outdoor spaces allowed	All learning services open with public health control measures	Travel across boundaries permitted with safety measures
Level 1-prepare Disease is contained	No restrictions	No restrictions	No restrictions	No restrictions	No restrictions

Note. Adapted from United Against Covid website, https://covid19.govt.nz/alert-levels-and-updates/.

Māori led response

Māori – the indigenous people of New Zealand who comprise 19.6 percent of the population (Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, 2024) – mounted a separate culturally specific health response to protect their people (Pihama & Lipsham, 2020). Drawing on principles of mana motuhake [self-determination], the National Māori Pandemic Group was set up in early 2020 alongside a range of community specific initiatives at the hapū [subtribal group] and whānau [extended family] level which have continued to manage risk facing their communities by using road barriers, distributing food parcels, and from 2021 onwards promoting and delivering vaccinations (Pihama & Lipsham, 2020). Historically, Māori have been significantly disadvantaged during both the smallpox epidemic of 1913 and the Influenza pandemic in 1918, where Māori died up to seven times that of Pākehā (white New Zealanders; Espiner, 2020). Systematic racism has been identified as one of the main contributing factors, resulting in Māori communities´ limited access to healthcare and restrictions around their ability to self-determine their own response to these health threats (McLeod et al., 2020). Over the later half of the 20^th century there have been a series of Māori-championed initiatives to improve national healthcare policy and practice (Durie, 1985). Māori continue to be marginalised in mainstream health care, however, and they are far more likely to have chronic disease at younger ages, therefore making COVID-19 disproportionately risky for Māori (McLeod et al., 2020).

New Zealand’s media landscape

New Zealand has a small media landscape with comparatively few outlets which are dominated by two for profit companies, neither of which have an explicit partisan agenda (Hope et al., 2021). Stuff operates the country’s largest news website and owns 11 daily newspapers which accounts for 48.6 percent of daily news circulation. New Zealand Media and Entertainment owns The Herald the most widely circulated news website that reaches 2.1million viewers, along with six other daily newspapers. Initial news coverage of the pandemic drew heavily on information provided by senior government officials at the televised daily 1 pm briefings (Morgan et al., 2021). This media coverage has been praised for encouraging support for public health measures through ‘expressions of care’ (Beattie & Priestley, 2021). In times of crisis, official accounts often affirm dominant understandings of community membership (Kellner, 1995). Regarding the NZ coverage, limited consideration so far has been paid to how the media itself constructed risk during the pandemic. This topic is important as the way risk is identified and framed relates to the kinds of physical and moral resources individuals and communities can draw upon in responding to such threats (Cottingham & Fisher, 2017).

Theoretical framework

Our theoretical framework in this study is underpinned by Mary Douglas’s (1992) socio-cultural approach to risk as a historically and socially situated form of social control and regulation. Douglas’ sociocultural theory of risk differs from dominant top-down theories of risk such as those of Beck or Foucault that frame risk as a distinctly modern form of governmentality resulting from globalisation and growing reliance on scientific expertise to govern and discipline human action and knowledge about society (Alaszewski, 2021). For these scholars, the product of these actuarial discourses has been the emergence of the individual who is rendered responsible for manging the manifold risks threatening their existence.

Douglas contends that risk is neither decidedly modern nor a Western concept, but rather that a version of this, often configured as sin or taboo, has been used to control behaviour through cultural norms across time and culture. This approach is particularly useful for studying pluralistic risk cultures whereby both scientific and traditional knowledges coalesce around risk as has been observed in NZ (Brown, 2015; Lane, 2015). Compared to epidemiologically informed notions of risk, Pihama and Lipsham (2020) contended that Māori conceptualised staying safe and mitigating risk during the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to the following three principles (i) rāhui (ritual restrictions/prohibitions); (ii) tikanga (protocols and practices); and (iii) manaakitanga (embracing others through care and support).

Pertinent to these community-oriented approaches, Douglas (1992) instead focuses on the role risk plays at a community level by considering how it is deployed to (re)configure the relationship between centre and periphery amongst members in a particular community (Douglas, 1992). Douglas contends that risk is associated with danger and othering processes that are pronounced where tensions emerge between the centre and the periphery (Douglas, 1992). Importantly, what is viewed as risky in the first place is shaped by pre-existing social hierarchies. She contends that where those in the centre feel their purity is being threatened by other bodies from the ‘outside’ – such as in the historical case of lepers and witches – those ‘others’ are delegitimised and devalued as dirty or ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966, p. 50; 1991). Douglas (1966, 1992) views emotions and rituals as vital mechanisms that connect the production of categories (those who are inside and those who are outside) with their relative value. By drawing on Douglas, Brown contends that risk scholars are directed to consider ‘who or what is worried about, who is worrying and in what way … and the underlying, constantly evolving, organisational-power relations between central and peripheral groups which configure and work through these risk processes’ (Brown & Zinn, 2021, p. 277).

To sharpen our understanding of how social inequalities are reproduced at the level of culture, we take an intersectional theory of risk approach which draws attention to the way that discourses about risks relating to COVID-19 were culturally and politically situated in ways that reinforce existing power relations (Olofsson et al., 2014). As a sensitising concept, intersectionality focuses our attention upon how ‘categories of difference [emerge] in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural ideologies, and the outcome of these interactions in terms of power’ (Davis, 2008, p. 68). Intersectionality, as an open-ended theory, focuses on how multiple and multi-layered axes of difference such as age, gender, class, race and disability status produce different social stratifications upon which social risks are subsequently produced and enacted. Olofsson et al. (2014) argue that the approaches’ attention to the multi-dimensionality of individual experience and multiplicity of dominating social systems (patriarchy, colonialism, ageism, ableism) offers an expanded account of how inequalities emerge that is often missing from more top-down theories of risk. Manca (2021), for example, has combined Douglas’ theories of danger and othering with an intersectional risk perspective to show how COVID-19 responses in English-language medical guidelines were organised around pre-existing economic, racial, colonial, and patriarchal power relations that disadvantaged some pregnant women more than others (Manca, 2021). We similarly combine Douglas’s sociocultural approach with intersectionality to understand how media risk categorisations interact with pre-existing intersecting inequalities.

Methodology

This paper draws on the widely used qualitative document analysis (QDA) method to understand how risk was constructed in the NZ news media across the first two years of the pandemic. A QDA perspective understands news media reports as socially constructed framings rather than direct windows onto truths. As Altheide and Schneider (2013, p. 69) put it, ‘what we call things … and how we frame and allude to experience is crucial for what we take for granted and assume to be true’. QDA aims to capture the meanings, emphasis, and themes of what is presented as well as how it is presented (Altheide & Schneider, 2013). It does so first by guiding the analyst to produce a quantitative overview of articles in terms of length, setting, frame and scope. Secondly the method promotes an in-depth thematic enquiry of a smaller sample of news reports to identify categories and themes. Taking a longitudinal approach, we wanted to understand whether framings of risk changed over the course of the pandemic in NZ as new evidence emerged and new public health approaches were trailed. While longitudinal media approaches have been effectively used in previous public health research to trace changing public discourses about immediate and long-term health crises (Miller et al., 2016; Tierney et al., 2006), these methods have not been applied widely to research the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sampling and search strategy

Our analysis compared the first week of news media coverage from the month of March in 2020, 2021 and 2022. We selected March 2020 as a starting point because this was the month the NZ government implemented its COVID-19 public health response. Articles were accessed from Knowledgebasket (https://www.knowledge-basket.co.nz), a news and information archive that compiles both broadsheet and online news articles published in NZ. As a team we developed and piloted search terms in Knowledgebasket to ensure their sensitivity. Search terms included ‘COVID-19’ OR ‘CORONA virus’ AND ‘risk’. We included news reports from mainstream news media outlets as we were seeking the general public mood and were also interested to determine the extent to which Māori concerns and epistemologies were included in national discussions. We included articles such as editorials, news reports, and letters to the editor.

KM extracted articles using this database and removed any duplicates (Table 2). In line with this method, we created an extraction template in Microsoft Excel derived from co-reading a sample of 15 articles from each year (Altheide & Schneider, 2013) (Table 3). Once this was confirmed, KM and TM worked together to extract all articles into this template, conferring frequently and resolving coding disagreements through discussion. Articles were selected using the Knowledgebasket algorithm which ranks articles by the most relevant to the search terms. We found that we reached saturation after 22 articles as this was the point where no successive articles reported new topics in both the coverage for 2020 and 2021 (Braun & Clarke, 2019). For consistency we applied this sampling scheme to the coverage in March 2022.

Table 2. Screening results.

Time period	Total no.	Off topic	Duplicates	Final Sample
March 2020	459	36	182	241
March 2021	237	74	85	78
March 2022	200	68	68	69
Total	896	173	335	388

Table 3. Characteristics of news article sample.

Characteristics of the Sample	March 2020	March 2021	March 2022
Length of Article
≤500	83	26	25
501–1500	144	45	42
1501+	14	7	2
Who identified at Risk
Anybody	103 (24%)	30 (22%)	25 (23%)
Asian	1	0	0
Economic dep.	17 (4%)	7 (5%)	1 (1%)
Front Line including their families	65 (15%)	21 (16%)	13 (12%)
Gender	17 (4%)	3 (2%)	0
Māori/Pacific	12 (3%)	15 (11%)	6 (6%)
Older people	43 (10%)	9 (7%)	14 (13%)
Other communities	80 (19%)	29 (22%)	23 (21%)
Social isolated	8 (2%)	4 (3%)	3 (3%)
Underlying conditions	36 (8%)	12 (9%)	21 (19%)
Who is determining risk
At risk person	34 (8%)	11 (8%)	5 (4%)
Central Govt official (Head office)	61 (15%)	31 (22%)	25 (22%)
Central Govt official (Locally based)	23 (6%)	8 (6%)	9 (8%)
Expert	47 (12%)	27 (19%)	21 (18%)
Family/Friend	10 (2%)	1 (1%)	2 (2%)
Front Line Responders	38 (9%)	8 (6%)	6 (5%)
Industry Representative	27 (7%)	12 (8%)	2 (2%)
Job blogs	5 (1%)	0	2 (2%)
Local Government	35 (9%)	6 (4%)	5 (4%)
NGO/volunteer rep	46 (11%)	6 (4%)	11 (10%)
Other	37 (9%)	16 (11%)	9 (8%)
Service provider	38 (9%)	16 (11%)	14 (12%)
‘At risk’ people’s voices
Yes	52 (22%)	18 (23%)	15 (22%)
No	189 (78%)	60 (77%)	54 (78%)
Article frame
Behavioural/Individual	70 (29%)	6 (8%)	8(12%)
Economic	30 (12%)	19 (24%)	12 (17%)
Environmental	1	0	0
Medical/Public Health	27 (11%)	27 (35%)	28 (41%)
Societal/collective	113 (47%)	26 (33%)	21 (30%)
Settings
Border	12 (5%)	20 (26%)	0
Community in general	97 (40%)	19 (24%)	38 (36%)
Consumer Settings	9 (4%)	5 (6%)	38 (36%)
Healthcare Settings	23 (10%)	15 (19%)	0
Home	16 (7%)	1 (1%)	5 (5%)
Institutional Care	9 (4%)	0	0
Public Settings	34 (14%)	6 (8%)	7 (7%)
Workplace	41 (17%)	12 (15%)	17 (16%)
Scope
Local	39 (16%)	0	5 (7%)
International	9 (4%)	9 (12%)	0
National	159 (66%)	61 (78%)	41 (59%)
Regional	34 (14%)	8 (10%)	23 (33%)

Analysis

We conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis of 66 news articles guided by principles of reflexive thematic analysis which draws from a social constructivist paradigm (Braun & Clarke, 2019). Through this situated, interpretive and iterative process (Braun & Clarke, 2019) we sought to understand how accounts of risk related to configurations of probabilities, categories, timeframes and values (Brown, 2020). We also sought to examine whose voices and experiences were highlighted or silenced in this media coverage. TM and DP read through and open coded each of the selected articles from March 2020. Together we categorised and condensed these codes from 2020 and then applied them to 22 articles from March 2021 and March 2022. Our analysis was enhanced by the productive tension between TM having lived in NZ during the pandemic whereas DP lived in Hong Kong making her an outsider to this NZ new coverage. Each article is presented with what number article it was (AR#) and what year it was published (M#) (see Supplement).

Findings

In the total final sample (n = 388), as presented in Table 3, we included 241 articles from March 2020, 78 from March 2021 and 69 from March 2022. We identified shifting frames of news coverage across the 25 month period. We identified 47 percent of articles taking a societal/collective frame in 2020, with this falling to 30 percent by 2022. On the other hand, the medical/public health frame increased from 11 percent in 2020 to 41 percent of the coverage by 2022. Coverage about risk and COVID-19 remained national in its scope across the period. By 2022, 59 percent of articles were about NZ on a national level. Articles became shorter in length across the years, with the initial coverage going into lots of detail about new public health developments and knowledge of the virus, which by 2022 was already well established and widely understood.

Across each year, one in five articles included the voice of someone ‘at risk’ in their discussions of risk. Central government officials and experts were consistently the main spokespersons about risk. Central government officials were quoted about risk in 15 percent of coverage in 2020, then in 22 percent of articles from 2021 and 2022. Experts (either academics or medical scientists) were quoted in 12 percent of articles and this increased to 19 percent and 18 percent of coverage in 2021 and 2022 respectively. Through our in-depth reflexive thematic analysis of a sub-sample of these articles, and as informed by the findings shown in Table 3, we identified three key themes among the predominant risk framings: (1) Subjects of risk (2) Spaces of risk (3) The nation facing risk.

Subjects of risk

Frontline workers

Frontline workers were the most widely discussed specific social group deemed at risk. This category included doctors, nurses, homecare workers, pharmacists, supermarket workers, funeral directors and recycling plant staff. Frontline workers were frequently described as collectively supporting the public health response and putting themselves in danger through their selfless yet risky contact with the general public. News coverage emphasised that frontline workers were the best equipped to handle the virus, for example, through their supply of PPE, with businesses going cashless, and the instalment of Perspex shields to protect staff (AR13M20). Coverage that directly quoted frontline workers often explored their fear and difficulties. For example, a 2020 article centred on a pharmacist in Auckland who was ‘working in fear’, whilst handling an ‘uncontrollable volume of scripts’, and receiving daily verbal abuse ‘on the frontline in the battle against Covid-19’. The article continues:

One lady who was getting medication for her husband yelled at me: ‘I’m putting my life at risk coming here, hurry up’ and that really hurt because my life’s at risk every day and I am trying my best to help everybody (AR22M20).

The poor working conditions of frontline workers was also a topic in the letter section with one contributor lamenting ‘their low, even reduced, remuneration, long/uncertain hours, demanding, often high-risk, conditions and a pervasive lack of reasonable consideration and understanding’ (AR17M21).

By 2021, news coverage of frontline workers was prominently centred on risks relating to the vaccinations roll-out. Vaccines entered the country in early 2021 but due to their limited quantities, the government initially decided to prioritise ‘emergency services, public health staff, GPs, frontline DHB [district health board] staff and aged residential care workers’ (AR1M21). The ensuing media coverage was morally supportive of this shift and framed their deservingness as owing to their willingness to face danger to serve the public interest. Such messages were reinforced by media furore over the perceived misallocation of some vaccine doses to people who were not deemed ‘essential’ (AR3M21). Whilst the government rationalised this choice of action to prevent dosage wastage, headlines noted the public’s disappointment and disagreement through headlines like ‘Health workers awaiting COVID-19 vaccine angry to miss out on spare doses’ (AR14M21).

Older people

In initial coverage older people were framed as inevitability at risk due to their age. This was illustrated by an article from March 2020 stating ‘older relatives and friends have always been at risk and continue to be at risk with this virus’ (AR15M20). Older age (which was rarely specified in early coverage) was deployed alongside the catch-all ‘underlying condition’ or ‘compromised immunity’. For example, an article about the first death in NZ plainly stated a ‘woman in her 70s died’ and that she ‘had an underlying chronic health condition’ (AR15M20). No older person was directly quoted in the news coverage, further contributing to older people’s passive framing. Older people’s high-risk status was also used to frame them as unable to support others, illustrated by another article:

A child of an essential worker who can’t stay home could have an identified buddy in their self-isolated group to take care of the child. Options are being looked at for childcare, but older people – including grandparents – and those with compromised immunity were not suitable people to look after kids (AR3M20).

On rare occasions older people’s risk was framed as being a product of their physical surroundings. For example, an article drawing on evidence from Professor Garry Nixon framed ‘rural towns as the most at risk’ due to limited access to healthcare in the area in comparison to their need, as ‘New Zealand’s rural towns have higher levels of chronic disease, more elderly people, higher Māori populations and poorer access to health services’ (AR17M20). By 2022 discussion of older people’s inherent vulnerability evolved into a sharper acknowledgement about how settings placed them at risk. Following the introduction of the vaccine older people’s risk began to be contextualised to their living in ‘high-risk settings’ (AR21M22) like retirement villages.

Māori and Pacific

Māori and Pacific people’s risk became an increasing focus on the news coverage by March 2021, with 11 percent of articles centred on this, up from 3 percent of articles the previous year. Of the limited 2020 news coverage, a handful of articles historically contextualised the risk of disease for Māori in relation to previous biological vulnerability related to the 1918 influenza pandemic where ‘the mortality rate for Māori was as much as eight times higher than for non-Māori’ (AR17M20). Coverage from 2021 focused on the social and environmental determinants which placed Māori and Pacific peoples more generally at greater risk of poor health outcomes, with one stating ‘Indigenous Māori and Pacific people are among the most vulnerable to viral infections, including Covid-19’ (AR7M21). Structural factors ‘such as overcrowded housing and higher prevalence of co-morbid conditions, including diabetes’ (AR7M21) were also noted as the potential contributors to Māori and Pacific peoples’ higher risk of infection and death.

While Māori and Pacific were framed as being at risk of Covid-19, media used language that did not frame them as vulnerable as a result, as illustrated in the following extract:

The governance group is working to ensure easy access for all, with an emphasis on the most vulnerable in our community, and on Māori and Pacific populations which are most at risk from the virus (AR19M21).

By the second year of coverage Māori and Pacific people were more frequently speaking for themselves in media coverage about the challenges facing their communities, especially around the vaccination roll-out. For example, Māori healthcare professionals were included in news coverage to emphasise the safety and value of the vaccine, as a Māori health provider is quoted: ‘It was a good opportunity to take up because from our perspective there is a lot of stigma and fear around the vaccines’ (AR14M21). Similarly, Pacific academic Dr Collin Tukuitonga was quoted that there was ‘the need to vaccinate Māori and Pasifika first’ as they were ‘at high risk’ and thus should be the ‘target’ of vaccine allocation (AR3M21). Being identified as ‘at risk’ was therefore offered as an option for Māori or Pacific peoples to get prioritised health access. As one article noted ‘Māori or Pasifika can have their age and ethnicity counted as a risk factor’ for access to oral treatments for COVID-19 (AR2M22).

Spaces of risk

Across the three years of coverage, a quarter of articles focused on ‘anybody’ being at risk of COVID-19. Articles consistently focused on community settings (40 percent in 2020) or public spaces (14 percent of coverage) as risky and focused on the riskiness of everyday spaces, activities and routines. Articles published in 2020 discussed at length the closure and suspension of spaces of entertainment like ‘bars, cafes, gyms, cinemas’ along with ‘playgrounds’ (AR1M20). In this coverage habitual and previously mundane acts like walking one’s dog were now presented as risky endeavours, as in this March 2020 article:

The council … . has added a request for people to keep their dogs on leads, even in areas that were usually off-leash (AR18M20).

The gravity and communal nature of pandemic risk was highlighted in the coverage of the first COVID-19 death in March in Greymouth. The mayor of the city was quoted as saying that ‘the death has also underlined the key message that people need to stay home during the lockdown’ to protect ‘us’, the centre, from the other ‘foreign tourist’ (AR15M20). The article continued:

The fact that the death occurred on the West Coast may further underline the crisis we face. If the death was in Auckland, then some may have been able to dismiss it as being related to ‘others’ and not ‘us’. But this woman was ‘us’. Not a foreign tourist nor someone returning from overseas. COVID-19 is here and it is real (AR15M20).

By 2021, the media focused on the new notion of ‘high-risk settings’ and saw risk spatially contained in particular areas, such as residential care facilities and border protection centres called managed isolation quarantine (MIQ) which were outside of the ordinary purview (AR3M21; AR13M21). MIQ centres received sustained attention during 2021 with the media running a handful of articles detailing the operation and daily-goings-on, seemingly to reassure the public that risk was successfully mitigated (AR10M21; AR12M21; AR15M21). Later coverage highlighted voices of individuals who were staying at MIQs. Some were angry and frustrated due to the extension of their duration of stay at MIQs, and one anonymised guest reported ‘feeling depressed’ and ‘waking up unable to breathe amid feelings of despair’ (AR15M21).

The spatial aspect of risk changed by 2022 coverage due to the NZ government’s pivot from a zero-COVID-19 policy to an acceptance that some community transmission was inevitable in a highly globalised world. Unlike 2020 coverage, where fear was associated with the widespread, all-encompassing nature of risk, this time there was an acceptance and tolerance of its continued presence. Ensuing news coverage contained a strong normalising discourse that people ought to adjust to the ‘new normal’ (AR13M22), and accept more biological risk as a trade-off for mitigating some of the economic and social risks. As stated by one shop owner, people are getting ‘more and more comfortable’ with the presence of contagion risk ‘being in society’ (AR14M22).

As society opened up, the media played an important affective role by offering a public space to discuss these risks. The most widely consumed newspaper, The Herald, carried a section called the Omichronicles for the entire month of March 2022 where they hosted a forum where various members of the public were asked to provide their opinions on issues like ‘what the new rules mean’ and how individuals should be acting (AR14M22, AR16M22). In the March 29^th edition, the public’s new thresholds for risky behaviours were explored by asking members of the public who were ‘healthy’ if they were continuing with risk mitigation behaviours ‘as if we were in lockdown’ (AR19M22). The majority of responders shared the consensus that they were living normally but taking small precautions such as ‘masking everywhere and socialising outdoors’ (AR19M22). This coverage was juxtaposed with epidemiologists’ opinions encouraging a far more cautionary approach: ‘there’s never been more COVID-19 circulating in the community than there is now, and people should not think there’s an all-clear’ (AR1M22).

The nation facing risk

Initial 2020 media coverage painted an ambivalent picture around how New Zealanders were going to respond to the public health measures. To assist in curbing virus transmissions, the public were consistently prompted in the media to consider the implications of their actions on others. This was presented alongside consistent messaging about the public’s freedom to choose their behaviour in response to the pandemic. News articles in this period typically ended with a moral coda suggesting that individuals act in ways that kept ‘yourself, and the more vulnerable members of our community, safe and well’ (AR2M20). Such sentiment was reinforced through nationalistic messaging ‘urging kiwis to stick to the plan to break the chain’ and ‘put themselves at risk to help New Zealanders’ (AR3M20). Media coverage across 2020 canvassed a range of voices, including police officers, psychiatrists, academics, and journalists, about whether the public was engaging with and acting upon such messaging. The reported consensus emerged that despite initial uncertainty was misplaced as the public was ‘well-behaved’ with high levels of community-orientated rule following and ‘abiding by the rules’ (AR2M20). Furthermore, it was noted in some coverage that members of the public were being too proactive in their response to the pandemic as medical professionals were ‘urging the public to refrain from turning up at coronavirus testing centres without GP referral’ (AR14M20).

This sense of collective moral duty carried on throughout the pandemic, evidenced by a letter to the editor in 2022 headlined ‘Safety first’ which emphasised how risk was viewed as something that was shared between whānau [extended family, a Māori term increasingly used by Pakeha] and was not irreducible to the individual. The letter writer also drew on their scientific orientation in describing their motivations to go above and beyond what is expected by the government public health measures:

The new reality is no-one cares if you get long Covid, no-one cares about you except yourself. Businesses have got what they wanted: freedom day. Don’t complain.

You cannot legislate for me to ignore my scientific approach to life. I’ll wear a mask and avoid unventilated, unregulated hospitality venues until a decent vaccine arrives. Assessing my risk and that of my whānau is my right (AR10M22).

When economic risks were considered, they were generally tempered with considerations about health and social costs posed to the wider community. NZ business were often framed in the 2022 coverage as adhering to a moral obligation to protect the community. Businesses decisions to enforce vaccinations amongst their staff was a common feature of news coverage by 2022 (AR6M22, AR15M22, AR16M22, AR22M22), with the CEO of a large national airline quoted as saying ‘The question we asked is why wouldn’t we’ (AR8M22). The prioritisation of health over the economic benefit of freedom of movement was reinforced in an article that outlined NZ’s duty to support other Pacific nations in procuring vaccinations before borders could be opened in a way that ensured ‘safe movement’ (AR11M21).

Conceptualisations of risk were sometimes embedded in Indigenous world views. One op-ed published in 2020 in the Northland Times, a geographic area home to a large Māori population, advocated for the national COVID-19 response to reflect Te Ao Māori values. The pandemic was referred to by the Māori author as a ‘tapu’ situation, defined as ‘probable risk to our holistic health and wellbeing’. The article indicates that in order to return back to ‘noa’ defined as ‘an ordinary state of normality or safety’ ‘kōtahitanga’[unity] was required, in which ‘each of us must be mindful of the impact of our behaviours and actions’ (AR16M20). In doing so, this article framed COVID-19 not as an exceptional risk but one which Māori are already equipped to handle, if enabled to by the national government.

One further framing of NZ’s collective-orientated approach was through comparison with the level of risks taken in other countries. Nine articles in both 2020 and 2021 compared other countries risk approaches, with all articles supporting NZ’s approach. As a contributor to the letters section quipped, ‘as many of us appreciate, there are far worse places to be stuck right now than our undoubtedly fair isles’ (AR22M21). Critical comparisons between NZ and Australia occasionally featured in 2021 coverage which disparaged the latter focus on economic activity over public safety (AR22M21). A handful of articles also critiqued the European response for being selfish and hyper-individualistic, especially with regard to vaccine reluctance, as exhibited in this letter to the editor in the Whanganui Chronicle that states ‘It beggars belief that large parts of Europe and UK became reluctant to receive the vaccine’ (AR18M21). There were a few critiques of NZ’s own vaccination rollout which was described as slow ‘by world standards’, however the article went on to emphasise that there was ‘no real urgency with rampant outbreaks as is happening overseas’ (AR21M21). By 2022 news coverage had ceased making international comparisons about risk, which likely reflected the way that by this time NZ had dropped its zero tolerance policy and adopted a ‘living with COVID-19’ approach already operating in most of the world.

Discussion

In this article we have presented a novel account of how the NZ news media constructed risk across three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Informed by Mary Douglas’s socio-cultural approach to risk, our findings show specifically how characterisations of risk and the social regulation they underpinned, were inflected by cultural values, which themselves were reproduced and remade in the process (Brown & Zinn, 2021; Jamison & Wu, 2021). Our analysis traced the on-going news media speculation about how New Zealanders would conduct themselves during the pandemic. In these discussions the national news media played an important affective role, as in previous pandemics, in reinforcing frames regarding the mutual risk of everyone and therefore reiterating the need for solidarity and mutual concern, rather than stigmatisation and exclusion seen in other nations (Joshi & Swarnakar, 2021). We suggest that the news media’s framing of risk actively reinforced the NZ Government’s ‘team of 5 million’ approach to stopping COVID-19 transmission through lengthy and restrictive lockdown measures (Beattie & Priestley, 2021; Mazey & Richardson, 2020). In cultivating this cohesive ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983, p. 24) the news media helped to promote good will between NZ citizens. This was especially important from 2021 onwards when NZ public health measures became more reliant on recommendations rather than prohibitions, a policy shift which occurred in other countries far earlier in the pandemic (Giritli Nygren & Olofsson, 2020). The synergy between media and government potentially also reflected the high level of mainstream social cohesion, at least during the beginning of the pandemic in NZ (Morgan et al., 2022). This analysis also helps to illuminate how risk was situated in national values and affective structures (Cottingham & Fisher, 2017) which produced a particular NZ composition of COVID-19 risk that balanced fairly epistemologically unified risk framings of individual’s susceptibility whilst also emphasising citizens’ connection and responsibility to others; most notably their whanau (extended family) but also the community as a whole. This later logic was akin to the Māori principle of manaakitanga (embracing others through care and support; Pihama & Lipsham, 2020). This finding supports the body of scholarship emphasising the need for culturally situated understandings of risk which take seriously how pluralistic societies blend scientific, traditional and common sense logics when considering risk (Brown, 2015; Lane, 2015; Zinn, 2008).

Our findings indicate that the NZ news media framing of risk was decidedly different to other Western settler-colonial countries that typically centred economic concerns and/or individual risk management strategies (Reny & Barreto, 2022). Indeed, we identified a thread of news coverage that critiqued other ‘Western’ nations, particularly Australia and some European nations for being too individualistic and unconcerned for those most at-risk. These findings echoed Douglas’s argument that it is essential for each culture to believe that ‘other cultures cherish wrong-headed concepts of justice’ (Douglas, 1992, p. 9). Our analysis shows how the NZ news media engaged in a form of policy nationalism with our findings partially mirroring examples in East Asia which exalted their collectivist values as ‘doing it better’ in terms of their COVID response than other Western nations (Kloet et al., 2020). In NZ this comparative approach had the effect of bolstering morale for on-going public health measures as other countries began to open up as it emphasised the high human costs of deprioritising the biological risk of COVID-19. Future research should further explore the role of media coverage of pandemics and nation-making practices as these emerge over time, as well as the impact these have on international relations and risk governance (Brown & Zinn, 2021).

Our final contribution relates to deepening understandings of how those identified at risk were handled in dominant public discourses, and how this changed over the course of the pandemic. Māori and Pacific peoples conceptualisations of risk were incorporated in dominant public discourses. We found that Māori and Pacific peoples were marginalised in initial coverage although there was some recognition about the impact of previous pandemics and structural determinants of health placing them at greater risk. This finding echoed early concerns raised by Māori leaders (McLeod et al., 2020; Pihama & Lipsham, 2020) and reflects the long standing omission of Māori in the mainstream press (Rankine et al., 2014). Nevertheless, coverage about Māori and Pacific people’s experiences of the pandemic increased over the following two years, and much of it centred on Māori and Pacific academics and health care professionals explaining the importance of the vaccinations. This culturally specific public health consciousness-raising has been credited for the high up-take in vaccinations amongst Māori and Pacific which has not been seen in other marginalised communities in other contexts (Prickett et al., 2021). We argue that this coverage reflects a successful application of what Douglas would described as conflict containment. Douglas (1999) contends that all social groups and organisations experience conflict as they try to incorporate different member’s various interests. She contends that in order to contain conflict, groups or organisations must have a ‘concept of a thought style’ (Richards, 2017, p. 183) deployed by the different actors to make sense of their interests, and understand how this relates to ‘how people are organized’ (p. 183). This analysis identified how NZ media discourses both included multiple thought styles around risk (including scientific and traditional epistemologies) and positively acknowledged that Māori and Pacific people had organised their COVID-19 response within their own cultural communities. As a result NZ saw the development of complementary public health initiatives based on positive feedback loops which resulted in high vaccination rates and low mortality rates.

We identified older people as another group talked about as being ‘at risk’. Coverage of older people initially framed them as being inherently risky subjects whose voices were not included. We contend that in over-simplifying their vulnerability and circumstances this coverage could be viewed as a form of ‘ontological violence’, in line with previous research around widespread ageism during the pandemic (Abrams & Abbott, 2020). Over the course of the pandemic we argue that this kind of ‘ontological violence’ lessened as older people’s risk was increasing framed around them being in high-risk settings and therefore not directly about innate qualities relating to their age. Finally, we identified the limited explicit consideration of the intersecting risks faced by people occupying multiple social positions, something scholars have identified in other national discourses (Nygren & Olofsson, 2020). We suggest that this likely produced further marginalisation for those occupying multiple positions such as older Māori or older frontline workers who were ‘looked past’’ in these media framings (Brown, 2020). A consequence these people likely received different and potentially conflicting public health messaging around their own risk status and their expected conduct. Thinking intersectionally around risk governance, by representing the experiences of those occupying multiply disadvantage positions in cultural discourses about COVID-19, would be a fruitful first step to tackling inequalities inadvertently produced by public health responses.

Limitations

By taking a longitudinal ‘snap-shot’ method to compare news media articles across multiple years, we have not addressed the discourses occurring between these time-periods. By focusing on mainstream news media discourses our analysis may have overlooked important counter-narratives and marginalised perspectives of risk that were better represented in user-led social media.

Concluding remarks

In this article we have presented a range of novel insights around how discourses of risk were produced through the NZ news media over three years of the pandemic. We conclude that the NZ news media emphasised the relational connection between New Zealanders and cultivated a sense of solidarity when considering risky subjects or spaces. We suggest any future COVID-19 risk mitigation policies need to further consider the cultural aspects of risk and the different scientific, common sense and indigenous epistemologies from which they draw. Researchers and policy-makers should also consider how discourses around risk have important implications for producing group membership within and outside of the national contexts; something that will have significant bearing on public health strategies.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2024.2372097

Additional information

Funding

Funding from the University of Auckland Performance Based Research Fund awarded by The Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences 2022.