Report “Most in the UK say news media have helped them respond to COVID-19, but a third say news coverage has made the crisis worse”

The report examines how people think about the coronavirus crisis and how different institutions in the UK have responded to it, based on a survey fielded from 13 August to 19 August 2020. Among its highlights:

• less than half of respondents rate news organisations as relatively trustworthy sources of information about COVID-19, down from April 2020
• a majority say that the news media have helped them understand the pandemic, and that has helped explain what they can do in response to it
• the UK government and individual politicians are most widely identified as ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ concerning sources of potentially false or misleading information about coronavirus

The report is the tenth Factsheet, part of the UK COVID-19 news and information project that analyses how the British public navigates information and misinformation about coronavirus and about how the government and other institutions are responding to the pandemic.