Why Media Systems Matter: A Fact-Checking Study of UK Television News during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Abstract

Academic attention towards the effectiveness of fact-checking often centres on how receptive people are to the correction of news. But many studies do not take into account audience expectations of fact-checking or their engagement with news generally in the context of a national media system or its political culture. Our study makes an intervention into debates about factchecking by focussing on the effectiveness this type of journalism has with audiences who were attentive to the news in the UK's media system during a key point in a major health crisis. Drawing on a six-week news diary study (N ¼ 200) during the coronavirus pandemic, our study concluded that the UK's impartial media ecology and public service ethos creates an environment where audiences are largely receptive to journalists' fact-checking and countering misinformation. Yet our content analysis of television news (N ¼ 1259) during the pandemic found most broadcasters did not regularly challenge or question the government's decision-making. We argue that since audiences favoured robust forms of journalistic scrutiny, broadcasters could more prominently fact-check claims and question dubious statements without undermining trust in journalism. We recommend scholars should pay more attention to understanding the audience reception of fact-checking across different media and political systems.

Taking Systems Thinking to the Global Level: Using the WHO Building Blocks to Describe and Appraise the Global Health System in Relation to COVID‐19

“…Despite pockets of organisation, the division of labour has, by and large, been uncoordinated, fragmented, at times competitive (Petersen et al, 2020), at times contradictory (such as with the effectiveness of facemasks (Martin et al, 2020), and without a single trusted source for information synthesis and guidance. One negative result has been higher informational transaction costs in reviewing and verifying evidence for policymakers and the general population, which has ripened the environment for confused messaging (Cushion et al, 2020), misinformation, and anti‐science scepticism (Rodriguez, 2021).…”

Expert voices in the news reporting of the coronavirus pandemic: A study of UK television news bulletins and their audiences

“…The diary study complemented the content analysis by exploring how news audiences were responding to the news coverage at the height of the first wave of the pandemic over the course of six weeks (16 April–27 May 2020). While diary studies have a long tradition in the social sciences and in psychology as a methodological tool for audience research ( Bolger et al, 2003 ), have only recently started being adopted within journalism studies ( Cushion et al, 2021 ; Mihelj et al, 2022a ). We selected a diary study enabling both qualitative and quantitative assessment of audience’ news media consumption habits and experience with news output for two main reasons.…”

“…The UK’s public service media system and political culture, in our view, represents an important case study to explore sourcing patterns in an impartial news environment and less partisan culture than many other countries. At the same time, as research has shown that during a pandemic a public service ethos does not automatically translate into news output that routinely and most effectively hold the powerful to account ( Cushion et al, 2021 ) and best serve the information needs of audiences ( Villena-Alarcón and Caballero-Galeote, 2020 ), our study has the potential to enhance the legitimacy of public service journalism in times of crisis through recommended editorial practices. As previously discussed, experts have long been an object of research which has attracted renewed attention in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis.…”

Do media systems matter? A comparative study of editorials on the migration crisis in the UK, German and Greek traditional press

“…However, economic and formal media ties with political parties were less common than in Southern Europe (Hallin and Mancini 2004) while the media approach towards politicians became more critical (Blumler and Gurevitch, 2001). This could be partially attributed to the fact that the partisan press system, coupled with strong commercial pressures and impartial broadcasting media (Cushion et al, 2022), allowed the media to operate free from immediate political control. The UK media, as part of the Anglo-American press system, during the 20 th century became an influential reference model for measuring and judging journalistic behaviours in other countries based on core values, such as objectivity and high professional standards (Esser and Umbricht, 2013).…”