From “Far Away” to “Shock” to “Fatigue” to “Back to Normal”: How Young People Experienced News During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how young people used and experienced news during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from 22 in-depth interviews with Dutch young people (19-36), we found four successive phases in which participants used and made sense of news in distinct ways. First, before the virus reached the Netherlands, they saw it as “a problem far away” and felt indifferent toward the news. During the second phase of “shock”, as COVID-19 reached the Netherlands, news use increased as participants frantically tried to make sense of the situation. Third, participants experienced “Corona-fatigue” due to informational and emotional overload and began “dosing” their intake of news. Finally, they became used to “the new normal” and returned to (perceived) regular levels of news consumption. Two new rituals stood out during the first wave: press conferences seemingly “interpellated” participants as Dutch citizens who should take their responsibility, and daily updates of COVID-19 cases were used as a gauge for how “we” were doing. Overall, participants’ position could best be described as critical-but-pragmatic: even if they questioned the veracity of some news, they chose to follow measures to curtail the virus.

KEYWORDS:

• News use
• news consumption
• ritual
• news avoidance
• doomscrolling
• COVID-19

Introduction

During the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis (February–June 2020), young people in the Netherlands were under the spotlight. In his speeches, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte addressed them explicitly, varying from warning to complimenting to reprimanding. Young people were considered to play a central role in the pandemic: they were less likely to get sick, potentially making them less likely to follow measures to curtail the virus and more likely to infect more vulnerable groups (e.g., grandparents). A key challenge was therefore how to reach young people and convince them to follow the measures. Whether one sees it as journalism’s role to inform, explain or advocate (e.g., Schudson 2008), at the very least each role requires understanding the informational needs and experiences of young people. Via 22 in-depth interviews with young Dutch people (19-36), this article seeks to answer how young people experienced the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis and which role news played in this.

We aim to add to existing literature on news audiences in times of crisis in three ways. First, whereas research typically focuses on either “risk groups” (Holland and Blood 2013) or the general public (cf. Davis et al. 2014; Henrich and Holmes 2011; Joffe 2011), this paper focuses on a group that was framed as barely at risk and asked to show “solidarity” with risk groups. Second, whereas most research was done in countries with average to low levels of trust in news, such as Australia and the United Kingdom (Henrich and Holmes 2011; Holland and Blood 2013; Joffe 2011), trust in the Netherlands has remained comparatively high (Newman et al. 2020). Third, as it has been a decade since the 2009/2010 Swine Flu pandemic, we aim to provide insight into how developments such as the rise of social media and mis- and disinformation have changed the ways news audiences use and experience news during a pandemic.

Literature Review

News Consumption During Covid-19

Across the globe, news consumption skyrocketed as COVID-19 spread. Summarizing that “[j]ournalism matters and is in demand again”, Newman et al. (2020) found that TV news, online media and social media in particular saw huge upticks in early April 2020. Trust in news was also higher than usual and, remarkably, the average levels of trust in news media and national government were nearly identical (Newman et al. 2020). In the Netherlands, TV news watch time increased 61% between March 6-22, and the press conferences by the Dutch prime minister drew in record numbers (SKO 2020).

However, these increases didn’t last long. In the Netherlands, TV news and digital news use decreased from April 2020 onward, with respondents citing information overload, low self-efficacy and negative impact on their mental well-being (De Bruin 2020). Nielsen, Kalogeropoulos, and Fletcher (2020) show that in the UK, between April–August 2020 trust in news media regarding COVID-19 dropped from 57% to 45%, and trust in the government from 67% to 44%. While a (decreasing) majority said news media helped them to understand and respond to the pandemic, 27% felt news media had exaggerated the crisis and 35% felt media coverage had made it worse (Nielsen, Kalogeropoulos, and Fletcher 2020).

News- and Information-Seeking During Crises

When people encounter an ambiguous situation, they typically seek to make sense of it through information seeking, a process described as “milling”: “a search for socially sanctioned meaning in a relatively unstructured situation” (Turner and Killian 1957, 59). Applying this notion to what people do when they receive a warning – and explaining why people often don’t act immediately when receiving said warning – Wood et al. (2018, 539) describe the following overall process:

(a) people receive information about an imminent threat in a warning message that creates uncertainty; (b) they interact with others and search for additional information, for example, milling, to make sense of the uncertain situation; (c) the result of the interaction is a revised definition of the circumstances in which they find themselves; and, then, (d) they initiate self-protective behavior based on that socially generated construction.

Wood et al. (2018) distinguish between the following shifts in people's thoughts after receiving warnings and milling: understanding (the meaning of the warning), believing (the content of the warning), personalizing (the risk), and deciding (what to do about the risk).

Milling includes more than using news media, and media scholars have long emphasized the need to look beyond media texts to understand how meaning is constructed (e.g., Silverstone 1994). Indeed, news media may not even be the main source of information during crises: Gray et al. (2012) found that during the 2009/2010 Swine Flu pandemic, people’s workplace (e.g., intranet) and community were their primary sources of information. Since the rise of social media after the last pandemic, specific social media uses during crises have also been identified. In a literature review, Houston et al. (2015) found fifteen distinct disaster social media uses, from providing and receiving preparedness information to (re)connecting with community members. Austin, Fisher Liu, and Jin (2012, 197) found social media are used for “insider information” during crises, and Liu, Fraustino, and Jin (2016) found people preferred interpersonal communication (texting, calling, talking face-to-face, e-mailing) over social media practices (liking, sharing, commenting).

News- and information seeking practices have also been shown to change during crises. When Hurricane Georges struck Puerto Rico in 1998, in the preparedness phase, audiences looked not for information about preparedness activities (which they considered common knowledge) but about the natural hazard itself (Perez-Lugo 2004). However, this may be “disaster-specific”, as Gray et al. (2012) found that during the 2009/2010 pandemic, audiences did desire practical information, e.g., on how to protect themselves. During the impact phase, Puerto Rican audiences looked to media for “emotional support” and for “ties with the outside world that break the isolation caused by the natural conditions” (Perez-Lugo 2004, 222–223). Finally, during the recovery phase, they sought to learn about how other communities had been impacted.

A second example of how audiences use news differently during different phases of a (perceived) disaster, is the 2016 U.S. election of Donald Trump. Moe et al. (2019) researched how Norwegian audiences experienced this event, focusing specifically on Carey’s (1989, 18) distinction between the transmission (“the act of imparting information”) and ritual (“the representation of shared beliefs”) functions of communication. First, participants saw the election as an annoying circus that could not be taken seriously and felt a clear distance (a situation “there”). Second, this perceived distance made way for “world-shattering-shock”: participants emphasized the implications of Trump’s victory for “our world” and “our values” (Moe et al. 2019, 9). News routines changed: some increased their information-seeking, others looked away to protect their mood. Third, participants returned to their “normal” news routines and state of mind, partly thanks to news which made them both begin to understand Trump voters but also see them as “those people” (Moe et al., 2019, 12), reinstating a sense of distance.

How Audiences Make Sense of News About Emerging Infectious Diseases

When it comes to making sense of emerging infectious diseases (EID), Joffe (2011:, 446) finds that the public response usually follows the “distancing-blame-stigma” pattern: people distance the EID from themselves/their group, blame particular entities for its origin and/or spread, and stigmatize people that get infected and/or are seen as intensifying the spread. Yet, during the 2009/2010 Swine Flu pandemic, in Britain blame and stigma were directed upward to governments and agencies like the WHO (Joffe 2011). She suggests this may have been driven by “EID fatigue”, or “a state of exhaustion, in members of the public, concerning attempts to repeatedly engage them with a series of threats presented by the mass media and by sectors of the medical establishment as the ‘next big killer’” (Joffe 2011, 458).

However, other researchers found that audiences were more critical toward news media than governments or experts (Davis et al. 2014; Hilton and Smith 2010; Holland and Blood 2013). In both Australia and the UK, coverage was seen as deliberately “scaremongering” (Hilton and Smith 2010, 9) or “fear-mongering” (Holland and Blood, 213: 529). Participants in Davis et al.’s (2014) study described news coverage with such phrases as “spin”, “embellished” and “with a grain of salt”, and Gray et al.’s (2012) participants called Swine Flu “bit of a joke, really” and said media were “overhyping” the pandemic risk as a “media beat-up” (4). Holland and Blood (2013) suggest news media were “a more visible target” (531) than experts or government, as audiences’ lived experiences did not match with the media’s narrative of a “novel” and “deadly” virus. Gray et al. (2012) also found that their New Zealand participants initially, when the virus appeared in Mexico, thought in terms of us-versus-them, believing “it won’t happen to me, because it happens to others” (4).

Importantly, questioning the media’s portrayal of the pandemic does not mean audiences were complacent. Interpreting media coverage “with a high degree of critical awareness”, Davis et al. (2014, 510–511) describe their participants’ position as “to endorse public health advice, while articulating pronounced skepticism.” Somewhat ominously, Joffe (2011:, 458) ends her article with the following observation:

Communicating risk to an EID fatigued, distrusting public will pose unprecedented challenges when an emerging infectious disease of threatening proportions next strikes.

How Young People Consume News

As in most countries, in the Netherlands, younger people are less likely to consume news (Lauf, Scholtens, and van Dooremalen 2020). This is especially true for TV news, which among all age groups was the main medium for 38% in 2020, but only for 18% and 21% in the age groups 18–24 and 25–34 (Lauf, Scholtens, and van Dooremalen 2020). However, these groups’ online news use and especially social media (news) use were higher than average (Lauf, Scholtens, and van Dooremalen 2020). Around 40% of both groups believed most news can be trusted, compared to 52% among all age groups (Lauf, Scholtens, and van Dooremalen 2020). However, young Dutch people’s trust in news is still higher than the overall average globally (Newman et al. 2020).

Young people’s news use may be best described as incidental snacking, i.e., encountered as a by-product of social/online media and characterized by brief, fragmented sessions (Antunovic, Parsons, and Cooke 2016; Boczkowski, Mitchelstein, and Matassi 2018; Costera Meijer 2006; Drok and Hermans 2016) – although Thorson (2020) has pointed out that not all (young) people “attract” news similarly. In terms of news avoidance, Shehata (2016) found that when young people avoid news, they do so structurally and across platforms. However, some scholars see young people’s limited news use less as a sign of a lack of social engagement than as a mismatch between conventional journalism and what young people experience as engaging, e.g., inclusive, constructive and connective journalism (Clark and Marchi 2017; Costera Meijer 2006; Drok and Hermans 2016). Costera Meijer (2006, 64) also found that when young people truly need it, (TV) news should stay as it is: “serious, […] true, objective, and reliable”, without embellishments.

Method

We considered in-depth interviews most suitable for understanding the role news played in how young people experienced the pandemic. These interviews were semi-structured, meaning a list of discussion topics was prepared to provide focus during the interviews while simultaneously leaving room to deviate from the list if other relevant themes came up (Kvale 1996; Lindlof 1995). Topics included participants’ experience of the pandemic, sources of information about COVID-19, news practices, (dis)trust in news, and experiences with fake news. We do not aim for generalizability but seek to provide insight into the lifeworld of young people during a pandemic.

We selected 22 participants through snowball-sampling, starting initially from our own social circles. We included fifteen women and seven men, whose ages ranged from nineteen to thirty-six. This group came of age as various social media (from Facebook to TikTok) became popular, making them a suitable group to explore how news use has changed since the last pandemic. While 19–36 may seem like a fairly broad age range, people within this range are similar in terms of news consumption and trust in news (Lauf, Scholtens, and van Dooremalen 2020). Participants were evenly spread between urban and rural areas of the Netherlands, mainly Amsterdam (city) and De Achterhoek (“The Rear-Corner”), a region in the east of the country. Education level ranged from high school to university. In terms of news use, participants ranged from (very) light user to heavy user. The interviews took place between March and June 2020, the majority in May and early June. They were either held in-person or via phone or Zoom. All interviews were (audio)recorded and transcribed.

For data analysis, we used the general inductive approach (Thomas 2006) and principles from grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 1990). Most notably, data collection and data analysis were interrelated processes, each interview informing the next as new themes emerged. For instance, when the first participants seemed to make sense of the pandemic temporally, this was carefully probed in the following interviews too. Transcripts were read thoroughly and all relevant words, quotes or passages were labeled via “open coding” (Corbin and Strauss 1990). Next, in the phase of “axial coding” (Corbin and Strauss 1990), similar labels were grouped into categories and further refined via constant comparison. Finally, we identified the overall relationships between the categories, finding that how participants experienced the pandemic and which role news played, could best be described in the form of four distinct, successive phases. To help the reader interpret these phases, Table 1 provides an overview of key developments during the first wave of COVID-19 in the Netherlands (March–June 2020).

Table 1. Key moments first wave (March–June 2020) COVID-19 Netherlands.

Date	Key moment
January 22	House of Representatives informed about new coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan (China)
Late January	First cases in nearby EU countries: Germany, France, Italy
February 27	First case in Netherlands
March 6	First COVID-19 death in Netherlands
Mid-March	Press conferences: first measures announced (e.g., no handshaking, work from home if possible, big events cancelled, schools, restaurants closed, 1.5 meter-rule)
March 23	Press conference: prime minister brands Dutch approach “intelligent lockdown”: additional measures, staying home as much as possible
March 31	Intelligent lockdown extended until April 28
Late March to early April	Peak in hospitalizations, deaths
Mid-April to July	Steady decline hospitalizations, deaths
May–June	Relaxations intelligent lockdown
Late July	Infection numbers start to rise again
September	Minister of Health states second wave has begun

(Source: Rijksoverheid.nl).

Results

Phase 1: A Problem Far Away

The first phase is characterized by one expression used repeatedly when participants referenced the situation before COVID-19 reached the Netherlands: “een ver-van-mijn-bed-show”, which translates to “a far-from-my-bed-show” and refers to an event that is happening far away and/or doesn’t concern you. COVID-19 was seen as something that “is [happening] there and stays there” (Anita, 30) and as nothing out of the ordinary, because “you hear that more often” (Danielle, 34). COVID-19 was linked to virus outbreaks in general and SARS specifically:

How often doesn’t this happen and I didn’t really see it coming, I thought it’s just like SARS or something, that just stays in Asia. (Marina, 31)

There was a sense of othering: COVID-19 was seen as a “there” (or even “their”) problem, and it would have no major implications “here”. Rather than annoyance (Moe et al. 2019), participants felt indifference.

Even when the virus hit Italy, much closer to the Netherlands geographically, participants were not seriously alarmed. Jackie (36):

When it hit Italy I did think […] this could mean something for us. But not to the level of quarantine […], in the beginning that definitely wasn’t on the table.

Indeed, even when COVID-19 first hit the Netherlands, participants reacted mostly unimpressed. There was no reason to monitor the news more closely: Jackie didn’t consume news for several days after the first reported case and was shocked when her boyfriend told her the number of infections days later. Several participants even reacted cynically when the virus reached the Netherlands. Agnes (35) remembers “everyone still thought [the situation] was kind of funny” and referenced a popular satirical talk show (Zondag met Lubach) making jokes about Corona, “and we all had to laugh hard about that”. Most participants didn’t take the situation fully seriously until national measures to stop the spread of the virus (e.g., closing of schools, bars) were announced during press conferences. Casper (25) wasn’t even impressed until he personally felt the effects of the lockdown:

I still remember very well […] that I was very cynical or very yeah laughing about the situation that [fellow] students were worried. […] that they couldn’t travel outside of the country.[…] In the weeks afterward I did [take it seriously], but that was mostly because then you yourself are faced with obstacles in your freedom and stuff like that.

Throughout this first phase, news played no other role than usual: COVID-19 required no special attention. It was only when national safety measures were announced and/or could be personally experienced that participants realized the severity of the situation.

Phase 2: State of Shock

In the second phase, participants were in a state of shock: they had not foreseen that COVID-19 would impact their own everyday lives. Distancing and othering disappeared: regardless of whether participants experienced the virus and its consequences personally, they were uniform in describing the crisis as a problem that concerns “everyone” and they saw it as their responsibility as “a citizen” to follow the measures set in place by the government.

In line with global trends (Newman et al. 2020), participants described their news consumption as increasing dramatically as they sought to make sense of this unexpected crisis. First, they said they visited their main news sources more frequently. Even those who could go days without consuming news or had a “news-finds-me” perception (Gil de Zúñiga, Week, and Ardèvol-Abreu 2017) now watched TV news or checked news apps/sites (including liveblogs) several times a day. Suggesting that young people still see public broadcaster NOS Nieuws as a “basic amenity” that they don’t use every day but must be there when they need it (Costera Meijer 2006), NOS was their top choice (across platforms). Kyra (26), who normally prefers light-hearted news shows, switched to NOS because “there you really just get serious information without jokes and without funny clips”.

Second, the intensity of news use increased: participants said they consumed news more intently, with full attention. Julian (21) illustrates:

Usually I was very often scrolling through my phone when the news was on TV, I was checking what was happening on social media and stuff like that, and now most often I’m actually really watching the entire news broadcast and paying attention to what is on.

Third, participants said they broadened their existing news practices. For a small window of time, some had an insatiable appetite for background information. Breaking with her usual routine, Nancy (35) bought a newspaper:

Then I bought the newspaper because I thought wow, this is a pretty big step, now really uh bars and restaurants are closing, schools are closing. […] I found I wanted to read the background on that, hearing how other countries are doing this, yeah what it means for everyone.

While this article focuses on news use, it should be emphasized that news media were far from the only information source participants relied on. They also consulted family members, friends and colleagues, information from their employer, official sources (e.g., RIVM, the Dutch equivalence of the WHO), search engines (“Googling” specific questions) and social media (especially Facebook).

Surveillance and Ritual: Between Anxiety and Comfort

During the “state of shock”, both the “transmission” and “ritual” function of news (Carey 1989) became more pronounced. First, participants consumed news to be informed and to try to understand what COVID-19 meant for their everyday life.

I think because there are so many changes and some changes have kind of a lot of consequences, that’s why I think it’s important to just, yeah really be up to date about all the latest things. (Dora, 22)

For several participants, this “surveillance” took on a compulsive character – a phenomenon known colloquially as “doomscrolling” or “doomsurfing”. Agnes (35) was “chaotically” reading any news source she could find, looking for confirmation of how bad things were and hoping to get some certainty from knowing the facts:

There were quite some articles about the way it’s spreading and that exponential growth and I thought, oh yeah this all fits my lightly panicked state. […] I also really badly wanted to know the facts and of course there was a lot of insecurity [but] if I read enough about it, then I can maybe [get] some assurance [in] that I understand what’s happening.

Reflecting what Silverstone (1994:, 16) called “the dialectical articulation of anxiety and security”, and showing a clear mix of surveillance and ritual, the news is simultaneously a source of fear and comfort. Lena (26) appreciated the daily updates of COVID-19 cases as a way to keep track of the situation but also found them scary:

In any case I found it nice to have them just to know what the state of affairs was, but […] it was really like being in a sort of movie (laughs) in a very strange situation, so it also had something strange or scary. But I am someone who does prefer being informed rather than not knowing. So it was nice [to have the numbers], but yeah also not, but you’re also not NOT gonna look at it.

In a similar dialectic of anxiety and security, Jackie (36) compared her incessant news consumption to eating chips:

You can’t stop anymore […] and demand and supply match well and you keep going. […] For me it’s also that I eat chips as a kind of satisfier, […] against stress. […] You keep going, kind of mindlessly going.

This frantic phase of compulsively consuming news didn’t last long. As we will see in the third phase, most participants quickly burned out from COVID-19-news and would soon severely decrease their intake.

The ritual function of new use was even more apparent in the two-weekly press conferences by the prime minister. First, the act of watching itself was done with the entire household and it was something to be anticipated. Marina (31) compared the press conferences to an exciting soccer match that you watch with friends:

In the beginning it was kind of exciting, like what’s going to happen, is there going to be a complete lockdown? We also said it’s almost like you’re going to watch soccer and you talk to each other about what’s going to happen.

The press conferences also created feelings of community on a more fundamental level. Agnes (35) referred to large numbers of Dutch citizens tuning in at the same time as “somehow very beautiful”: it “created a sense of togetherness” that made “everyone [say]: ‘yes, together we can do this’”. When Jackie (36) was asked why she watched the press conferences live, she compared it to Remembrance Day, an annual ceremony commemorating all Dutch civilians and soldiers that died in wars and peacekeeping missions since the start of WW2. Broadcast live from the Dam Square in Amsterdam, it includes two minutes of silence.

You also don’t watch the commemoration on the Dam […] or [keep] two minutes of silence after the fact. This kind of feels the same, like this is something for the community and the entire Netherlands.

Jackie’s remark that you wouldn’t watch the commemoration delayed either suggests the significance of the press references’ liveness: you had to be there.

However, participants’ interest in experiencing the press conferences live would dissipate over time, as they lost some of their informational and ritual function when infection rates went down: new announcements were seen as less (immediately) relevant and the conferences went from being described as “tension and sensation” to “long-winded” and “boring” (Martina, 31).

Distant but not Othered

Although participants were markedly uniform in describing their news use during the first wave of the pandemic along temporal lines, one small group of participants didn’t experience phase two as as a much of a “shock”. Consequently, they also didn’t feel the same frantic urge to delve into the news. These participants were from the same sparsely populated, rural part of the Netherlands that wasn’t as heavily affected as the bigger cities in the West or regions in the South. Since they weren’t, as Donna (19) put it, “locked up in a small apartment in the middle of the city”, they didn’t feel the need to read news about COVID-19, unless it directly impacted their lives. Murielle (21) explains:

The news doesn’t really matter to me, only that [news] from [prime minister] Rutte I always find very interesting, if he decides new things like with his press conference. Then I do sit in front of the TV, like ‘hmm what will he say now’ and then very consciously [watch] those things like ‘Hey, what impact does that have on my job and [on] doing things and stuff’.

Rather than interested in information about COVID-19 itself, Murielle wanted to know the consequences of new measures for her own life. Daily updates of cases were not part of this, as Samuel (21) explains:

I [think] the other news is less relevant, like the number of people that are still in Intensive Care or how the economy develops, I think that’s less important for me.

While it could be argued that the sense of distance these three participants felt from “the city” is comparable to the distance other participants felt before the virus hit the Netherlands, it should be emphasized that all three did feel COVID-19 concerned “every citizen in the Netherlands” (Murielle). While they did perceive a distance, there was no “othering”.

Phase 3: Corona-Fatigue

If phase two was characterized by a sudden urge to consume news, in the next phase the opposite occurred: participants became what they called “Corona-fatigued” and consequently withdrew from the news. Yet, none avoided news completely. While Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink (2020) distinguish between “avoiding” (deliberately skipping certain news content due to topic or valence) and “abstaining” (staying away from news or limiting your exposure) (cf. Skovsgaard and Andersen 2020), the most accurate description of the participants’ news practices during this phase may be dosing. We define dosing as deliberately taking in the news in appropriate quantities, including a sense of taking back control. Lena (26) describes this practice as “healthy”:

It’s really more moderate and more in control. So […] I just created moments for myself like, now I'll check, and didn't let it all just wash over me.

Participants gave two reasons for decreasing their intake of news: informational and emotional overload. First, they felt the news became too much (of the same). Samuel (21) illustrates:

At one moment I reached a point like OK now I avoid Corona-news, because you get so much information and there is a whole lot of repetition, [so] at some point you’re like, OK, now I know.

A clear sense of aversion started to develop, as Anita (30) illustrates: “Yes because the whole day it’s corona, corona, corona, corona and then at some point you’re like ugh, you don’t need to hear this misery the whole time.”

Second, news became too emotionally taxing. Karla (26), a copywriter for a travel agency, had to deal with negativity at work all day and therefore did not want to read “negative news” at home. Other participants reported becoming “grumpy”, “bleak” or even “deeply unhappy” from consuming news about COVID-19. Rick (36), who was concerned about potentially infecting his pregnant girlfriend and as a TV news editor had to keep up with the news for work, even described becoming “depressed”:

Yeah, it made me depressed, being in it the whole time. It was a consistently bad feeling and it only kept getting worse, worse, worse, worse. […] It starts to taking over your life and I began feeling bad. I just noticed I was […] less happy than usual […] and at some point it became averse to that and that’s why I […] decreased [my news consumption].

While participants overall felt Dutch news media did a good job reporting on COVID-19, Terrance (30) criticized them, not for “scaremongering” (Hilton and Smith 2010), but, more nuancedly, for “making him afraid” by being too quick to report medical news that would later be contradicted. He specifically referenced reports of “cured” patients that became re-infected, followed by reports that – at the time of the interview – suggested these patients had likely never been cured in the first place:

If I had never seen that [second report], I would have lived with the idea that when I get sick and get better and I get sick again and [could] die, you know? So I really wanna watch out for that [type of news].

He made the case for limiting his consumption of news about COVID-19 once he understood “the basic principles”:

So just washing your hands and all those things, I find that important that I heard that, check, OK, sort of like objectively, this is the story, this is what we’re gonna do about it, these are the handy tools you get, OK check, got it.

He argued the only news he needed to keep up with once understanding these “basics principles” were big announcements from the government.

Keeping up with the Main Story: Daily Numbers as New Ritual

As the idea of dosing suggests, throughout the third phase, participants did continue to consume news in quantities appropriate to them. This mainly took the form of keeping track of practical information: which measures were in place and what the trend of COVID-19 cases was. Echoing Terrance’s quote, Josh (21) said staying informed meant “mostly that I know which rules I have to follow to keep both myself and others healthy or not infect them”. Casper (25) had an additional reason for not completely avoiding news: he wanted to experience “history in the making”:

This corona time is something that let’s say in 50 years I’ll still talk about with my grandchildren, […] then I do want to know that I really experienced this period in a very conscious way. The moment I completely shut myself off from it then I think I’m missing or taking away from myself some general knowledge or a piece of experience of my own life.

During the third phase, a new daily ritual solidified: checking the daily updates of COVID-19 cases released around 2PM. Dora (22) explains: “Yeah I just know exactly when it comes out, so around those times I check more often because I know news is coming”. These daily updates had two functions for participants. First, they provided comfort, as the number of cases decreased considerably during May and June, when most of the interviews were held:

Especially this last week it does kind of give peace that the numbers are going down so much and that the intelligent lockdown worked. I think I got a lot of comfort out of that or a happy feeling, that you can turn it around all that […] misery. (Marina, 31)

Second, the updates allowed participants to keep a finger on the pulse of how the (national) fight against the virus was going:

Those numbers for me really are a sort of mainstay like OK, do we all together as a society have to be ashamed for the behavior that we showed or should we be proud of how we all together followed the rules so well that we are unburdening the healthcare? So I think it’s a really good reflection of the behavior of the whole society in regards to the advice of the RIVM. (Casper, 25)

The numbers were used as a heuristic to gauge how “we” – the Netherlands as a country – were doing. Danielle (34) even adjusted her behavior when the daily death toll went below 100 – a threshold mentioned by several participants:

I noticed I […] became less careful and thought ah, now I can walk in the park with a friend or colleague. […] And I only started doing that when the news became more positive again.

Pronounced among especially the younger participants was their desire for more positive news that could provide them with some perspective. While they realized predicting the future was impossible, they still desired to hear about “when things will be possible again”, arguing this would make it easier for them to keep following the rules. A common complaint about the daily numbers was that it wasn’t always clear what they signified. Regarding the death toll, Josh (21) explained:

I get the feeling it was mostly people that were already on the border of dying, if they got serious pneumonia or a serious fever they would have died from that, but now it happens to be Corona and that is the culprit.

While not positive in any sense, the suggestion here is that knowing it was mostly vulnerable people who died, would provide some sense of relief.

Phase 4: Back to Normal

In the final phase, participants seemed to become used to “the new normal”. After a period of limiting their intake, their appetite for (other) news was growing again. This was also due to news media paying more attention to non-COVID-19 related news.

[My avoidance of news] has slowly become less, because yeah it became more normal that there was Corona, and then news also became more interesting to read, because it’s not repeated by everyone all throughout the day. (Samuel, 21)

According to the participants, there was now also more room for positive and light-hearted news. Donna (19) believed that news media even actively tried to present news more positively.

I think now there is more news [about] what we can do again [and] the media channels also really try to report the news more positively.

Participants felt that after a high peak and a deep low, their news use was returning back to normal levels:

I think [my news use] at this moment has become pretty normal again. […] I check [my news app] every now and then, just read the news, and then in the evening I hear something here and there from the [TV] news and talk shows. That’s kind of how the daily life is now. (Karla, 26)

Trust in News: Critical but Pragmatic

When asked how they would rate Dutch news media’s overall performance during the pandemic, participants unanimously said they had done a good job, ranging from “fine” and “satisfactory” to “exquisite” and “very satisfied”. They felt Dutch news media could be trusted, especially compared to news in countries like the United States (“very polarized so you have to take both sides with a grain of salt”). Public broadcaster NOS was seen as the most objective and trustworthy source. Remarkably, a few participants argued NOS was most trustworthy because it had – as they believed –a direct line with the government. Nancy (35) thought NOS was most reliable “because you always see the press conferences on [the public channels] as well”, unaware that they were also broadcasted live on commercial TV channels. Terrance (30) believed NOS was most objective “because it is the state, by the state”. While a close (perceived) relationship between government and news media is typically seen by audiences as less trustworthy (Palmer, Toff, and Nielsen 2020), for Terrance this “direct line” made him trust NOS more.

However, their trust in news does not mean they were uncritical. Participants named points for improvement (e.g., less hype) and did not take all news at face value. Several participants mentioned that since news media were partly dependent on information from China, this news should be interpreted with caution:

In China […] things are said and NOS copies that but whether it’s really true I doubt that a bit. I’m not saying NOS is doing it wrong, but more that China is saying things and NOS copies that, so yeah. (Valentina, 21)

Similar remarks were made about the WHO and its Dutch equivalent the RIVM. Rick (36) interpreted news based on information from the RIVM with caution because they had had to retract earlier statements (e.g., that chances COVID-19 would spread to the Netherlands were very small).

OK, they’re saying this based on the information they have now, but it could also be that in a month that turns out to be less true. But that has less to do with let’s say the NOS as writer of the message than with the source that’s behind it.

It is notable that neither participant blames the messenger: the news media – and to a lesser extent even the RIVM – aren’t to blame because it isn’t their fault the information they based their reporting on later turned out to be “less true”. Rather than blaming news media for reporting unreliable information, they are skeptical of the information itself. Still, participants’ overall position could best be described as critical-but-pragmatic: even if they questioned the veracity of some news, they chose to follow measures to curtail the virus.

Encountering Conspiracy Theories

Most participants said they encountered conspiracy theories, especially one about 5G causing COVID-19. While this theory in particular was instantly dismissed and ridiculed, other stories that were prevalent on social media, including various assertions about how the virus wasn’t as dangerous as the government claimed, were – while not believed by anyone – not as easily dismissed. As Rick (36) argues, “if even the most important [national] source, the RIVM, at some points in the beginning didn’t properly assess the situation […] that makes it hard to judge what is a conspiracy theory and what isn’t”. However, if participants didn’t outright dismiss such stories, they chose to ignore them. Anita (30) explains:

I’m not going to zoom in on that, […] so many people, so many opinions. […] There will always be people that don’t agree and maybe a different [strategy] would be better, but yeah, the government simply chose this, well yeah, so be it. […] These are the rules we applied as a country, yeah, then I’ll try my best to follow those rules.

This attitude could also best be described as critical but pragmatic: while the possibility that the government is wrong is left open, the most sensible thing is to go along with the route they chose. This was even the case for the one participant who actively sought out conspiracy theories. While Jackie (36) called NOS “the most objective, independent” news medium, she still approached their news with what she called an open mind:

I’m not like ‘oh I definitely know 100% that NOS is speaking the truth’. I don’t know in any case, so I always try to hear both sides, how strange and weird the one side may sound sometimes. […] But I’m not going to make a judgment about it, because I don’t know what’s true.

Jackie argues she listens to conspiracy theories out of pure curiosity, as a sort of mind experiment, similar to what Fenster (1999) has called “a form of play and sense of pleasure in which participants can ‘experience’ the rush and vertiginous feelings associated with discovering conspiracy”. Jackie says the following about listening to a [spirit] medium who claims to be able to speak to the COVID-19 virus directly:

I find it at least entertaining and […] it gives me things to think about and then I’ll see what I’ll do with it. [When the medium said something], I think, yeah it could be, you know, I never go like ‘oh I believe that’, I don’t really need that. I don’t need to choose one thing to hold onto. I’m quite OK with […] not knowing things.

Again, it appears she likes to explore the ideas in her mind, but that is where it ends. When asked if she discusses these theories with anyone online, she answered resolutely: “No, I listen to those things and further than that it doesn’t go for me. I just find it interesting to take it in and nothing else”. And, reflecting the same critical-but-pragmatic attitude Anita exhibited, when asked how such theories impact how she viewed the COVID-19 measures, she said she follows the rules very strictly:

I just let them go, because, you know, with your thoughts you can go into all directions, but when something practical has to be done, at some point you just have to choose something to hold onto and to go along with. […] I notice I choose to believe that […] this [Dutch approach] is the best way, and I notice I really go along with that.

While leaving all options open in her mind because she can never truly know what is true, in practice – like all participants who questioned or criticized certain reports or information about COVID-19 – she chose to endorse and follow public health measures.

Conclusion

This article explored the role news played in young people’s experience of the first wave of COVID-19 in the Netherlands. Remarkably similar to Moe et al. (2019), we identified four phases in which participants used and made sense of news in distinct ways. Phase one saw a sense of distancing and othering: COVID-19 was a “there”/“their” problem that participants felt indifferent to. When there was a serious outbreak in the Netherlands, a second phase of “shock” followed. Participants increased their news use as they frantically tried to make sense of the situation. The ritual qualities (Carey 1989) of the government’s press conferences – described as a national event you must experience live – stood out in particular; this will be further reflected upon below. In phase three, participants experienced “Corona-fatigue” due to informational and emotional overload and began “dosing” their intake of news: taking control by consuming the news in appropriate quantities (cf. news avoidance, e.g., Skovsgaard and Andersen 2020). “Corona-fatigue” should not be confused with “EID fatigue” (Joffe 2011), as participants did not feel warnings were overblown. Finally, participants grew used to “the new normal” and returned to (perceived) regular levels of news consumption.

Somewhat unexpectedly, participants argued their being young played no role in what they expected from news media during the pandemic. Even those who normally preferred light-hearted news and satire (see also Marchi 2012), now desired serious, objective, reliable news. This could suggest that during times of emergency, people’s demands for news – regardless of age – grow more uniform. However, after the “shock” phase, especially the younger participants did indicate a desire for more positive, constructive news. Future research may therefore explore how (young) people’s news use and experiences develop after the initial shock and its immediate aftermath (e.g., later waves of COVID-19). Public broadcaster NOS Nieuws being participants’ top choice (across platforms), suggests Costera Meijer’s (2006) point about Dutch young people seeing NOS as a “basic amenity” still holds. While it is no surprise that during crisis people gravitate toward their most trusted (legacy) source (Newman et al. 2020), considering young people’s use of online and social media anno 2020 (Lauf, Scholtens, and van Dooremalen 2020), participants’ reliance on TV news stood out in particular. However, rather than signaling a (durable) comeback of linear TV for this age group, we suggest this instead points to a desire for liveness during crises (see also below), for which TV may simply be the most convenient choice.

Adding qualitative insights to the consistently high levels of trust found in the Netherlands (Newman et al. 2020), our results suggest that trusting Dutch media does not mean audiences accept news uncritically. Participants named various ways coverage could improve (e.g., less hype). Yet, remarkably, this did not seem to reflect negatively on the news media themselves – participants appeared to separate the content itself (the veracity of underlying information and sources) from the (trusted) provider of the news. One possible explanation for the high Dutch trust numbers is that participants compared the Netherlands to other countries (e.g., U.S.) and concluded Dutch news is comparatively trustworthy. Explanations for why research in other countries found audiences were much more negative toward news media during the 2009/2010 pandemic (Davis et al. 2014; Hilton and Smith 2010; Holland and Blood 2013) include that Dutch media already enjoyed more trust and, most probably, that the severity of the 2020 pandemic prevented our participants from accusing media of overhyping the crisis. Whereas Davis et al. (2014) defined audiences’ position toward news about the 2009/2010 pandemic as “pronounced skepticism” (Davis et al. 2014), our participants’ attitude could best be described as critical but pragmatic. They acknowledged that news about the virus could be wrong, that non-mainstream stories may not always automatically be dismissed, and that the government’s approach may not turn out to be the best one, but nonetheless believed it was most sensible to go along with the route that had been chosen.

Two new “rituals” (Carey 1989) stood out during the first wave: the government’s press conferences and the daily updates of COVID-19 cases. Couldry’s (2003) notion of “media rituals” – referring to situations where media (appear to) stand in “for something wider, something linked to the fundamental organizational level on which we are, or imagine ourselves to be, connected as members of a society” (4) – is useful here. He argues that rather than seeing rituals as fulfilling some natural need to connect, functioning to hold society together, we must look at questions of symbolic power and at how media rituals do not express but naturalize order (Couldry 2003). Key to both rituals was the privileged status of “liveness”, which affirms, as Couldry (2003) argues, our idea that media connect us to a shared and, importantly, current reality. The press conferences seemingly “interpellated” (Althusser 1971) participants as Dutch citizens, as even rural participants who felt physically distant from COVID-19 believed it their responsibility as a member of Dutch society to adhere to the government’s measures. These press conferences had to be watched live because they were “for the community” and inspired a feeling of “together we can do this”. Similarly, the daily updates let participants gauge – almost in real-time – how “we” were doing (“should we be proud or ashamed?”), providing instant relief when numbers were going down and even helping participants determine how strictly to follow the measures – even if they questioned what the numbers meant exactly.

The high importance assigned to the press conferences and the daily numbers also raises questions about how central news (in the very strict sense of news checked and reported by journalists) was to participants’ experience of the pandemic. If we apply the notion of “milling” (Turner and Killian 1957) (i.e., information-seeking after a warning) and look for its consequences for “understanding”, “believing”, “personalizing” and “deciding” (Wood et al. 2018), we could argue that news played its main role in understanding and personalizing the pandemic. Participants turned to news to make sense of the virus and to understand what newly announced measures meant for them. For believing and deciding (to act), news seemed to play a more modest role. Participants didn’t take the virus seriously when news was their only exposure to it; it took press conferences and – for some – their personal experience of the consequences of the measures to believe the threat was real. As described above, for deciding how to act, the press conferences and daily numbers seemed to play a key role. While these were of course also reported by news media, it could be argued – even though participants themselves didn’t always make this distinction – both are first and foremost government communication tools.

What follows is that future studies looking into sense-making during crises may take a broader (ethnographic) approach that doesn’t center around journalism. In addition to official (government) sources, following Gray et al. (2012), people’s workplace and community (family, friends etc.) also deserve more attention. Follow-up studies of people’s experiences during later waves of COVID-19 are also advisable, as (some of) the phases found in this study are likely to be specific to the first wave. Finally, it would be relevant to explore how people with less (or no) trust in news experienced news media’s handling of the pandemic.

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their constructive, insightful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

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