Media Agenda and Press Conferences on COVID-19 in Mexico: An Analysis of Journalists' Questions.

Pamela Pereyra-Zamora,Julio C Aguila Sánchez,Ninón I Llano Guibarra

doi:10.3390/ijerph182212067

Abstract

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to strengthen health communication in times of crisis. This study aims to analyze the media agenda of press conferences on COVID-19 in Mexico during the first two phases of the pandemic, based on journalists’ questions. The study is based on framing theory. The method used was content analysis from a quantitative perspective. This method was explicitly applied to the final section of the conferences, which dealt with “questions from the press.” The results show that at the beginning of the pandemic, the press was more interested in the government’s management of the health crisis than in issues such as the prevention of the disease itself or the economic impact of the crisis on the country. Moreover, the main characteristic of the questions was that they were generally socially relevant. In conclusion, we found that in the media agenda of the Mexican conference, the frame of attribution of responsibility was prominent but in combination with the frames of conflict, human interest, morality, and economic consequences.

Highlights

The imprint of the COVID-19 pandemic has made visible the need to strengthen health communication in times of crisis
When analyzing the themes of the questions, it was observed that of the total number of questions on the impact of the crisis on the economy, 74.3% were asked in phase 1, and only 25.7% were asked in phase 2
The press played a significant role at the beginning of the pandemic by putting public, media, and political interest issues on the public agenda

Summary

Introduction

The imprint of the COVID-19 pandemic has made visible the need to strengthen health communication in times of crisis. Communication that promotes citizen cooperation in the care of individual and collective health is crucial to overcome the crisis These elements highlight the interaction between journalism and public health. In order to understand the role of the press in the current crisis, it is necessary to recover the theories of mass communication that explain the place of the press in the (re)creation of social reality. One of these theories is agenda setting [3], according to which the media cannot decide what the masses should think; they can impose the issues to think about through their inclusion/exclusion in the public agenda. More than half a century ago, this theory made it clear that the issues discussed or debated in the media become more important than those silenced

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