No change without some continuity: Evergreen health myths resurfacing during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated journalistic corrections

Abstract

Crises allow falsehoods to flourish in communication environments, prompting negative consequences. Corrections issued in response, such as journalistic fact-checks, have difficulty undoing the harm falsehoods cause. This has been attributed to the design and distribution of corrections, presented as diametral to how false / misleading claims are reported; however, this argument has never been tested in a single study. We addressed this research gap through a content analysis of journalistic coverage of health myths surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of journalistic corrections. We found that 86.1 % of the misinformation items addressed in this coverage echoed health myths described in the literature for other outbreaks, suggesting that misinformation is largely recycled and tweaked to apply to new outbreaks. We also found major differences regarding the actors that journalists presented as those in which falsehoods and corrections originated – with the former stemming mainly from the civil society domain and the latter from the science domain. Finally, we found differences in the key properties of misinformation and corrections in the journalistic coverage analyzed, agreeing with existing theorizing. This suggests that corrections have a competitive disadvantage compared with misinformation. To address this, corrections should employ more supporting visuals and decreased complexity.