JOHNSON CITY – Dr. Mildred F. (Mimi) Perreault of East Tennessee State University is the coauthor of an article examining how journalists approached coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was recently published in American Behavioral Scientist.
“Journalists doing journalism during COVID experience a high level of personal responsibility to provide information to the public because it could save lives,” Perreault says. “People could be in a better place if I’m really careful about how I write what I write and I emphasize the facts and actions people can take.”
This article, which the assistant professor in ETSU’s Department of Media and Communication wrote with her partner and research colleague, Dr. Gregory P. Perreault of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, came about through the efforts of the COVID-19 Working Groups for Public Health and Social Sciences Research based at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In “Journalists on COVID-19 Journalism: Communication Ecology of Pandemic Reporting,” the Perreaults looked at how journalists influence and are influenced by their environment.
Through analyzing interviews with journalists and discourse from U.S. journalism trade press, they “discovered that during COVID 19 journalists discursively placed themselves in a responsible but vulnerable position within the communication ecology – not solely as a result of the pandemic but also from environmental conditions that long preceded it. Journalists found their reporting difficult during the pandemic and sought to mitigate the forces challenging their work as they sought to reverse the flow of misinformation.”
Perreault has a strong background in crisis communication. As a young journalist, she covered hurricanes in south Florida and an earthquake in Haiti. As a doctoral student at the University of Missouri, she published an article on modifications made to tornado warnings in Joplin, Missouri, following the catastrophic 2011 tornado in that area, and for her dissertation, she conducted a case study of how journalists covered a devastating 2015 flood in a small Texas community.
During her doctoral studies, Perreault began working with Dr. Brian Houston of the University of Missouri’s Disaster and Community Crisis Center, where she is still a fellow. There, she was able to delve into her interest in how journalists manage risk and crisis themselves and then position themselves in a place to share information about the crisis. She uses a “communications ecology approach,” looking at how a crisis affects journalists personally and how it affects their ability to share accurate, trustworthy information.
Perreault came to her research for her current article when the Disaster and Community Crisis Center associated with the University of Colorado Working Groups. While most projects undertaken by the Working Groups went in a different direction, Perreault said, she really wanted to look at local journalism and how the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting the way local journalists covered the news.
The Perreaults accessed meta-journalistic discourse – “journalists talking about how journalists do their work” -- through a database at the University of Missouri’s Disaster and Community Crisis Center, and found significant similarities between their interviews and what journalists were saying in their discourse.
In addition to observing the high level of personal responsibility journalists feel in covering COVID, the researchers also found that “journalists set norms for what’s acceptable in coverage in their meta-journalistic discourse,” Mimi Perreault said. “By talking about what’s being done right and what’s not being done right, they’re able to establish a new norm in a situation where we might not know how to respond. For instance, in dealing specifically with misinformation, what is the process for verifying that the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is accurate or the WHO (World Health Organization) is accurate, and how does that apply to local health agencies? What does it mean when we get something wrong, or some public official gets something wrong, and you have to correct it?”
Perreault said it is important to recognize the intersection between personal and professional in journalism, just as this intersection is commonly recognized in such other professions as psychology, education and health care.
“I think one of the things that this really illuminates is that a lot of times, in natural disasters, we think about the media as being this big, functioning conglomerate,” she said. “Journalists are people navigating this just like anybody else. In a crisis, you’re making decisions in real time. Sometimes you don’t have all the information you need at the time that you have to make a decision and share it.
“It’s important to understand that just like we, as human beings, have to take what we hear and process it, a journalist also has to do that. They have to process it at an individual level, and then also at a professional level at the same time.”