Do We Need Media Guidelines When Reporting on Panic Buying? An Analysis of the Content of News Reports During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ravi Philip Rajkumar

7 citations0/0 files storedFrontiers in Communication

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Communication and COVID-19 Impact Public Relations and Crisis Communication Misinformation and Its Impacts

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its attendant supply chain disruptions and restrictions on internal movement, has been associated with frequent episodes of panic buying both in its initial phase and in subsequent waves. Empirical evidence suggests that news media content and consumption are important determinants of attitudes and behavior during the pandemic, and existing research both before and during the pandemic suggests that panic buying can be influenced by both exposure to media reports and their specific content. This pilot study was conducted to assess the quality of media reports of panic buying during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, using two independent measures of news article quality. Seventy news reports of panic buying across 12 countries, covering the “second wave” of the pandemic from January 1 to December 31, 2021, were collected through an online search of media outlets using the Google News aggregator. These reports were analyzed in terms of the content of their reporting, based on existing research of the factors driving panic buying during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each report was scored for quality using two different systems: one based on an existing WHO guideline, and one based on the work of a research group which has published extensive work related to panic buying during this pandemic. It was observed that a significant number of reports contained elements that were likely to amplify, rather than attenuate, panic buying behavior, and that the quality of news reports was generally poor regardless of pandemic severity, cultural values, or freedom of the press. On the basis of this evidence, suggestions are offered to improve the media reporting of panic buying and minimize the risk of fear contagion and imitation.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

References

2002The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others 2010Role of media reports in completed and prevented suicide: Werther v. Papageno effects 2020Panic buying in the COVID-19 pandemic: A multi-country examination 2021COVID-19 information overload and generation Z's social media discontinuance intention during the pandemic lockdown 2020Impacts of COVID-19 on Trade and Economic Aspects of Food Security: Evidence from 45 Developing Countries 2021Psychological factors and consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020Psychological underpinning of panic buying during pandemic (COVID-19)2020In Times of Trouble: A Framework for Understanding Consumers’ Responses to Threats

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.