COVID-19 dominated headlines in 2020, and journalism is in demand again.

A significant rise in news consumption triggered by the coronavirus crisis offered a rare chance for journalism to justify its existence as more people stayed home for social distancing purposes and relied on news to stay up to date.

In retrospect, however, it remains questionable how much the South Korean press contributed to the fight against the health crisis.

Despite the media’s positive role in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak -- informing and educating the public about the unknown disease -- it increasingly drew criticism for fueling fears, reinforcing social stigmas against certain groups and politicizing the pandemic.

In late March, a survey of 1,000 Koreans by a team led by professor Yoo Myung-soon of the Seoul National University Public Health Graduate School showed that the most trusted source of information was the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, with 86 percent of respondents saying they considered it credible. This was followed by the National Medical Center at 83.7 percent and public health clinics at 81.81 percent. Only 30.7 percent of the respondents said they trusted the press.

According to Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020, only 21 percent of Korean survey respondents said they trusted most news most of the time -- the lowest percentage among the 40 countries in the survey.


Journalism fueling fear, hatred and stigma

Reporters, media watchers and experts interviewed by The Korea Herald pointed to three cases where the media coverage threatened public health and authorities’ antivirus efforts -- the label “Wuhan virus” for the new coronavirus, the media’s focus on the “gay bars” one COVID-19 patient visited, and its coverage of a health scare concerning flu shots.

At the beginning of the pandemic, media outlets called the coronavirus the “Wuhan virus” because it was thought to have originated in the Chinese city. This led people to blame China for the pandemic, and it fueled hatred for Chinese people in Korea and Koreans returning from the city.

In May, some news outlets put unnecessary focus on the “gay bars” a coronavirus patient had visited. This may have influenced the behavior of others who had visited the same bars, pushing them into hiding due to the risk of being outed.

“How the media covered it -- as if homosexuality spread the coronavirus -- was against human rights,” said Song Kyong-jae, a professor at the Kyunghee University Institute of Public Governance and Research, adding that the pandemic had revealed the “dark side” of Korea’s journalism. “The media themselves were polarized and did not help the public engage in (constructive) debate.”

Most recently, the media were accused of stoking fears over vaccine safety by highlighting the number of people who died shortly after receiving flu shots even though no direct connection was found between the deaths and the vaccines. 


Structural problems

Song points out that the media’s behavior is strongly influenced by homegrown search engines such as Naver and Daum, which curate news articles for their news sections. Amid a fall in newspaper advertising revenue, media outlets tend to focus on churning out articles that will be highly visible on the portal sites and get more clicks.

“The negative role of journalism is being amplified and reproduced with the advent of the portal sites,” he said. “But news outlets are also getting cozier with making profits by relying on the portal sites instead of coming up with alternatives.”

“As long as the mechanism of producing and distributing news does not change, there will not be a change in the way the media reports on disasters,” he said, adding that one idea could be to push the portal sites to create sections for investigative news, for example.

Reporters on the forefront of covering the coronavirus crisis simply did not have time to do it all, and the priority was still straight news reporting.

“A day went by quickly after updating the daily coronavirus tally online, covering the government’s briefings, writing articles for a print version and updating it,” said a reporter, who covered the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the coronavirus pandemic between May and December for a major daily newspaper.

The reporter, who wanted to stay anonymous, often worked until 11 p.m. only to find similar articles on the front pages of the country’s newspapers. She constantly questioned herself, asking whether it was so important to write about the same straight news stories that others were covering too.

“In reality, we have to compete with other papers to more rapidly deliver news and we cannot be the only one lagging behind in the competition,” she said. “Also, online news traffic shows that audiences read straight articles on the coronavirus case numbers most, not in-depth articles.”

She said the solution might be more investment in producing quality news -- hiring more reporters, putting in more effort to control the quality of news coverage and shifting the focus to digging deeper into issues that matter.

“We didn’t become journalists to sell articles. We are here to realize the public’s right to know,” she said.

The press’s role during the pandemic was limited to simply livestreaming the situation rather than finding and verifying facts, according to a report by the Korea Press Foundation.

After analyzing 1,081 news articles from 12 media outlets from Jan. 20 to May 31 last year, the research team found that 88.3 percent were straight news articles, while only 5.6 percent were news analyses and 0.5 percent were investigative reports.

Reporters cited politicians more than any other sources, with politicians providing 15.6 percent of the information in their articles. Next were the health authorities (9.6 percent), municipalities (9.4 percent), government officials (8.2 percent) and infectious disease experts (7.4 percent).


Role of journalism for a post-pandemic future

With a mass coronavirus vaccination program set to begin next year, the media’s role is crucial in delivering accurate and verified information transparently, without exaggeration or political motives, to help the public’s decision-making process, according to Lee Hyuk-min, a professor of laboratory medicine at Yonsei University.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, the media played a positive and important role to improve understanding of the new infectious disease,” he said.

Lee -- a source many reporters turned to for interviews and comments during the pandemic -- said there was a tendency for reporters to deliver what they wanted to say in the form of news, picking and choosing what they wanted to hear from experts.

Reporters should instead produce in-depth pieces that offer constructive ideas, trigger public debate and help the government improve its antivirus policies during the pandemic, he said.

“For example, yes, there is a problem in the current social distancing scheme. Rather than only criticizing the government’s response, reporters should also be able to help analyze the situation and provide alternatives,” he said. “The government cannot fight the pandemic alone.”

Lee So-eun, a senior researcher at the Korea Press Foundation, said blaming the portal site-dominated structure for the low quality of journalism is just an easy excuse.

“News reports on coronavirus should be helpful in solving problems and address audiences’ needs. So far, news articles tended to be repetitive, politicized and lacked in-depth information on facts,” she said.

On a hopeful note, she added that the public’s increased reliance on the media amid the pandemic provides an opportunity for journalism to regain trust if it plays its fundamental role -- delivering the information people need.

By Ock Hyun-ju (laeticia.ock@heraldcorp.com)