https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6673-0987
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ABSTRACT
Solidarity among society is considered crucial to tackle the corona pandemic. With the crisis evoking a high need for orientation, the information people obtain from different sources may shape whether they feel a strong sense of cohesion in the pandemic. To test this assumption, an online two-wave panel survey among a quota sample representing the German population aged 18+ was conducted in March and April 2020. Applying a path model, we show that using high-quality news media for information on the corona crisis (e.g., public broadcasting services) nourished people’s sense of cohesion, while using alternative and hyperpartisan news sites had a detrimental effect. Relying on information from low-quality news media (e.g., tabloids) did not affect people’s sense of cohesion, while talking to private contacts had a limited positive effect. Perceiving the public discourse as constructive vs. dramatized mediated the effects. These insights illustrate how the news media and other information sources in high-choice media environments contribute to a solid vs. polarized community in disruptive times of a crisis.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Our theoretical line of arguments suggests condensing tabloids and private broadcasting into the scale “low-quality news media”. Yet the internal consistency of this scale was low, suggesting that an increase in the use of one source does not necessarily increase the use of the other source. We therefore additionally computed all analyzes and models with the single low-quality sources instead of the condensed scale. None of the results changed, which is why we keep the grouped variable for reasons of parsimony.