@article{2022:reinemann:i_don,
title = {“I don’t care, ’cause I don’t trust them!” The impact of information sources, institutional trust, and right-wing populist attitudes on the perception of the COVID-19 pandemic during the first lockdown in Germany.},
year = {2022},
note = {How citizens perceive social crises is heavily influenced by the
information sources they use and their individual characteristics.
These strongly impact how the information received is processed and
interpreted. This should also be true in the case of the COVID-19
pandemic that started to shake up the world in early 2020. Based on
recent research in political communication, we hypothesize that
institutional trust in media, politics, and science, as well as
right-wing populist attitudes, should influence how people think about
this crisis, which was managed by politics based on scientific
expertise and covered intensively by the media. Therefore, this paper
asks how the use of different information sources, the trust in these
sources, and right-wing populist attitudes influenced the perception
of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic during the first phase of the
first lockdown in Germany. It draws on data from a quantitative online
quota-survey of German citizens and concludes on the basis of
segmentation analysis, first, that even in the early days of the
pandemic, sizeable segments of the population were either skeptical or
completely denied the risks of the pandemic, questioned the scientific
consensus around it and rejected mitigating measures. Second, besides
right-wing populist attitudes and several other factors, the segments
significantly differed in their degree of trust in traditional media,
politics, and science as sources of information. We discuss the
results in light of the necessity to build, preserve, and restore
trust in media, science, and politics as a prerequisite for crisis
prevention, communication, and management.},
journal = {SCM Studies in Communication and Media},
pages = {132--168},
author = {Reinemann, Carsten and Haas, Alexander and Rieger, Diana},
volume = {11},
number = {1}
}