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”

Year of production: 2020

Image is illustrative. Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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.

Authors

Reuters Institute

University of Oxford

Photo of Richard Fletcher
Richard Fletcher

Richard Fletcher is a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and leads the Institute’s research team.

Photo of Antonis Kalogeropoulos
Antonis Kalogeropoulos

Antonis Kalogeropoulos is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool and a Research Associate of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Photo of Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is the Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford.