Truth on Demand: Influences on How Journalists in Italy, Spain, and Bulgaria Responded to Covid-19 Misinformation and Disinformation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted fundamental social institutions, and the media was no exception. Journalists were challenged to report on an outbreak of pressing health-related information, complicated by malinformation erupting in a time of enhanced public demand for reliable facts. This study uses in-depth interviews with journalists at leading news outlets- both public service and commercial, in Italy, Spain, and Bulgaria (N = 24) to examine how they responded to misinformation and disinformation arising in the initial months of the pandemic. Using the frameworks of journalistic epistemology and the hierarchy-of-influences model, we explored the norms, routines, and practices guiding journalists’ truth claims as well as the individual, routine, organizational, and social-systems influences shaping their decision-making. We found three common narratives of conspiracy theories consistent across different media systems: “big state” concerns, evident in people questioning the very existence of the coronavirus as a pretense for globally enforced state supervision on individual freedoms; “big pharma,” or people blaming the lack of a cure for COVID-19 on pharmaceutical companies pushing for vaccinations; and “big fear” attitude - falsehoods about vaccines potentially causing more harm than good, including changing people’s DNA. We also discuss three common strategies journalists used to respond to COVID-misinformation: deflecting, countering and false equivalency approach.