Rasmus Kleis Nielsen’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

In this Reuters Institute report, we look at three key lessons learned on communications in the coronavirus crisis and look to the months ahead. We focus on communications because communication is central to any crisis, including a public health crisis, and is central to the political discussion around how we, as a society, handle them. Information from a wide range of sources, as well as people’s perception of the trustworthiness of these sources, will influence how they understand and respond to the crisis, and how they evaluate which institutions are helping address it (and which ones not). As researchers have long known, it is perceptions of risk, not actual risk, that determine how people respond to crises (Glik 2007), and these perceptions are influenced in large part by information from news organisations, sometimes by misinformation and disinformation, and by many other sources going well beyond official communication by governments and public health authorities. This is why, as WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in February, with the arrival and spread of COVID-19, ‘we’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic’, a deluge of information, some of which is misinformation, political propaganda, rumours, or other forms of unreliable material.2From a public health perspective, the UK may face the second wave in some ways better equipped to deal with the epidemic. But the erosion in trust in key institutions we saw in the spring and summer means it is less well equipped to deal with the coronavirus communications crisis. Doing so effectively with waning attention and trust will require learning from the spring and summer and special emphasis on engaging those most at risk. To help with that, we offer three lessons identified on the basis of our work on the UK COVID-19 news and information project, where we have worked to analyse the role of news and media in the crisis over the last six months.

This article provides one of the first analyses of visuals in misinformation concerning COVID-19. A mixed-methods analysis of ninety-six examples of visuals in misinformation rated false or misleading by independent professional fact-checkers from the first three months of 2020 identifies and examines six frames and three distinct functions of visuals in pieces of misinformation: how visuals illustrate and selectively emphasize arguments and claims, purport to present evidence for claims, and impersonate supposedly authoritative sources for claims. Notably, visuals in more than half of the pieces of misinformation analyzed explicitly serve as evidence for false claims, most of which are mislabelled rather than manipulated. While this analysis uncovered a small number of manipulated visuals, all were produced using simple tools; there were no examples of “deepfakes” or other artificial intelligence-based techniques. In recognizing the diverse functions of visuals in misinformation and drawing on recent literature on scientific visualization, this article demonstrates the value in both attending to visual content in misinformation and expanding our focus beyond a concern with only the representational aspects and functions of misinformation.

Social Media and Democracy - edited by Nathaniel Persily September 2020

The idealized view of the press as an institution that operates independently from private and political interests and tries to hold power to account is central to many journalists’ self-conception and extensive academic scholarship on news. Yet surveys find significant numbers of citizens reject such views about the role of news in society. This article draws on in-depth interviews with a strategic sample of 83 news avoiders in Spain and the UK to investigate “folk theories” about the relationship between news and politics. Instead of believing in the watchdog ideal, many saw the news media as, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, actively complicit with a distant and self-serving political and economic establishment. Many saw the news not as bringing important subjects to light, but as actively covering them up. The difference between professional and scholarly theories that stress the watchdog role on the one hand, and folk theories where this notion is completely absent on the other, highlights the specific cultural challenge journalism faces today. Cynicism about the role of news in society poses a problem that transcends the specific economic, political, and technological challenges that currently preoccupy many journalism professionals and institutions.

Drawing on scholarship in journalism studies and the sociology of expectations, this article demonstrates how news media shape, mediate, and amplify expectations surrounding artificial intelligence in ways that influence their potential to intervene in the world. Through a critical discourse analysis of news content, this article describes and interrogates the persistent expectation concerning the widescale social integration of AI-related approaches and technologies. In doing so, it identifies two techniques through which news outlets mediate future-oriented expectations surrounding AI: choosing sources and offering comparisons. Finally, it demonstrates how in employing these techniques, outlets construct the expectation of a pseudo-artificial general intelligence: a collective of technologies capable of solving nearly any problem.

In this Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford report, we examine information inequality and other social differences in how people have navigated the coronavirus communications crisis in the UK based on data from a series of surveys fielded fortnightly since mid-April. Our research was conducted as COVID-19 rippled through the UK with hundreds of thousands infected and tens of thousands of fatalities, creating severe and often very unequal social and economic impacts from both the disease and responses to it, and increasingly intense public discussion around the UK government’s handling of the crisis.

Despite growing expectations that technology journalists serve as critical watchdogs of the technology industry, technology journalism remains under-studied in journalism studies. Drawing on the hierarchy of influences model to analyze semi-structured interviews with UK technology journalists and editors, this article investigates how journalists strategically navigate relationships with the technology industry and how these relationships influence reporting practices. Providing a needed examination of day-to-day technology reporting practice, the article demonstrates how journalists manage a range of pressures, limitations, and challenges. In doing so, it shows that, in how it is defined and practiced, technology journalism remains interlaced with the technology industry in ways that may undercut growing calls for critical, rigorous, and independent technology reporting. Ultimately, this article makes the case for treating technology journalism as a distinct field of inquiry.

In this factsheet we identify some of the main types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation seen so far. We analyse a sample of 225 pieces of misinformation rated false or misleading by fact-checkers and published in English between January and the end of March 2020, drawn from a collection of fact-checks maintained by First Draft News.

Polarization is a key area of interest for media and communication scholars. We develop a way of measuring how polarized news audience behaviour is at the national level. Then, we analyze survey data from twelve countries and find (1) that cross-platform (online and offline) news audience polarization is highest in the United States, and within Europe, higher in polarized pluralist/southern countries than in democratic corporatist countries. Furthermore, (2) in most countries, online news audience polarization is higher than offline, but in a small number it’s lower. Taken together, our findings highlight that, despite the well-documented fears associated with algorithmic selection, news audience polarization is not inevitable in environments that are increasingly characterized by digital news consumption, and that the historical, economic, and political factors emphasized by the comparative tradition remain critically important for our understanding of global trends.

This study uses 48 in-depth interviews with managers, editors, and reporters at local and regional newspapers and their parent companies in four countries (Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) to examine how they discuss changes to their business models and the ways their news organizations are adapting to emerging audience-consumption trends in the digital environment. The results show that interviewees continue to prioritize the economic importance of their print products, despite declines in advertising and subscriptions. They also believe that for local news to continue, journalists must better understand the business strategies of their news organizations. Finally, they acknowledge the value of experimenting with new approaches to monetization, including implementing paywalls and using analytics to personalize content. In balancing the merits of their print products with their desire to develop new digital offerings, local newspapers seek to operate as ‘ambidextrous organizations’ that exploit the products of the past while exploring innovations that may help sustain them in the future.