Media Coverage of COVID-19: A Classical Case of Media Frenzy

Abstract

The effect of media on the wide varied audience in the recent days with continuous updates on the
COVID-19 related information has led us to see that there is shift from enthusiasm to panic behavior
among the viewers. The study focuses on how in recent days there is an intense spike in demand for
healthcare and related information among the social media users who were directly influenced by the
repeated exposure to continuous real-time data. With varied level of content acceptance, we have
seen that there have been miserable outcomes where people have ended up with wrong decisions from
the incomplete understanding of information. The idle social activity viewers get carried away by
certain information in social media with wrong interpretations such as information from unverified
sources about current situation, disease facts, myths and biases, likely treatments and home remedies.
With media being a very vast area to have a control over in short time with censorship over the
information broadcasted and content being shared around unverified by social media users about a
new and unknown disease, there needs to be a strategy to control it. The study explores the possibility
of controlling the unverified spread of information in social media by categorizing the information
into multistage information to reach out to the audience and avoid exposure of data leading to
panicking and impulsive decision-making audience.