Manifestation of panic in mass media: Covid 19 case in Lithuania

Abstract

The present comparative study reports the preliminary stages of a larger analysis on the Mass media has a huge influence on masses. It shapes peoples' mindset, attitudes, and often their actions in certain situations. Mass media has massive control over the mindset especially during the crises and emergencies. Mass media provides most important source of information in our society about: politics, economics, health care, entertainment, crime, and so on. Existing modern larger television broadcast networks and news portal news components known from the global COVID-19 pandemic. The key research question- whether the use of mass media power was used just for the COVID-19 news spread or it was used to the intimidation of public in order to increase the media ratings overall. This topic is very sensitive, and then various recommendations are made to the media: economic recessions, health care courses, political rankings, and so on. Having manipulative power, media channels, their editors and journalists, headlines, reports, videos that could easily raise fear and moral panic among all members. The purpose of the research is to analyze panic manifestation case of COVID-19 in Lithuanian and global mass media channels. Qualitative content analysis research method was selected because ot was suitable for long-term observation of the sample in 2020 March 21 to April 21, four Lithuanian and foreign channels (Delfi.lt, CNN, TV3, CBS news) were examined: headlines, visual and textual content, comments, reports, characteristic baskets, pulling, provocative and panic- causing elements, traits The results of the study revealed that manifestation of panic was observed in all selected channels, but news of a global media organizations were more constructive and accurate and local media channels were more focused on intimidation and to the amount of news.