Characteristics of Croatian News Portals Reporting on the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020 in the Pre-crisis Period

Abstract

Public health crisis provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic is the issue that marked 2020 the most from various angles, as well as the communication one. This paper examines media echo of COVID-19 pandemic crisis in pre-crisis time in Croatia, before the first registered case of the infection. The most important result of the performed research is that the media coverage of the analyzed news portals in critical period may be valued as credible because the media releases used multiple sources and the authorship was transparent. Group of actors that in pre-crisis gained the most visibility were politicians. Research also demonstrated that news portals emphasized numerical data concerning crisis in media releases, while explicitly marking the situation with the word ‘crisis’ did not occur in large-scale.

Keywords

• crisis communication
• pre-crisis
• covid-19
• news portals
• media credibility