COVID-19 Media Coverage on Spanish Public TV

Abstract

The respiratory syndrome SARS-CoV-2 has affected over 100 countries during the last weeks. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization de­clared the COVID-19 outbreak a pan­demic and since 31 December 2019, 201,315 deaths have been reported. The media has played a key role in providing information and making people aware of the situation during this emergency situation. This re­search seeks to examine the corona­virus media coverage on the Spanish public TV (TVE1). In order to achieve this goal, a content analysis based on the five stages of grief, an audience survey, and focus group interviews were conducted. The results have shown that coverage has undergone different phases. Accordingly, each of these stages has been perceived by the audience. Although both the au­dience and the experts appreciate the work of Spanish public television, the majority opinion is negative. In this re­gard, they state that it has not been impartial and there has been an ex­cess of information. For researchers, these results provide important guide­lines to increase the number of liter­ature reviews by considering not only the news but also the audience and experts’ perceptions. Keywords: COVID-19, coverage, audi­ence, perceptions, content analysis.