COVID-19 and the Media: A Pandemic of Paradoxes

"For IMS, a rights-based approach means supporting public interest media not simply for the sake of developing good journalism, but because good journalism has the potential and intent to bring positive change through ensuring accountability of those exercising power and protecting people’s human rights."

This report by International Media Support (IMS) seeks to provide a comprehensive assessment of the human rights impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public interest media. With a focus on four IMS partner countries - Colombia, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine - the report uncovers a number of far-reaching and often paradoxical impacts that COVID-19 has had on the media through 2020. The impacts are discussed in relation to four themes: the right to freedom of information, the rise of misinformation on social media, the safety of journalists, and media viability. Based on the findings, the report concludes with specific rights-based recommendations that IMS believes are crucial to securing the future of public interest media.

The findings outlined in the report are based on in-depth interviews with journalists from the four IMS programme countries mentioned above, as well on desk research of existing reports from 33 IMS partners and input from leading journalism monitoring groups. Case studies of initiatives by IMS media partners in Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, and Zimbabwe are also included at the end of each chapter to highlight how some media outlets are dealing with the impact of COVID-19.

In order to highlight the human rights interests at stake when public interest media is threatened, the report uses a human-rights-based approach to assess the complex and diverse impacts of the pandemic across all four themes, tracing the inter-dependent relationships between the legal obligations accepted by States Parties to the major treaties of International Human Rights Law (IHRL).

The report is divided into four main chapters, one for each thematic area of the pandemic's impact. The first chapter offers an analysis of the impact on freedom of information, a foundational human right, and outlines how State responses have enabled or infringed on this right, the subsequent apparent tension between the right to health and the right to information, and how human rights bodies offer guidance on approaches for policymakers to follow.

Chapter 2 looks at the impact of misinformation that has accompanied the growth of social media and that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. It reveals how it now represents a threat to the right to health, and assesses the extent to which it can be considered a threat to freedom of information. The chapter also offers a rights-based approach to the tensions between freedom of information, the right to express oneself, and unlawful hate speech and discrimination.

The third chapter looks at how the pandemic has affected the safety of journalists, such as physical offline safety, mental health, online abuse, and state surveillance. The discussion also outlines best practice as set out by international human rights bodies. The impact of the pandemic on the viability of public interest media is discussed in Chapter 4. Many journalists, surveyed through 2020, agreed that this was the single most significant threat to their work. In addition to looking at effects on revenue and audiences, the chapter examines how threats to the business of public interest media are also threats to the plurality of opinion, especially when it comes to increasing the number of women in the newsroom.

The findings reveal a number of paradoxes, as highlighted in the title of this publication. For example, on the one hand there has been a decline in press freedom, yet on the other hand, there is a rising demand of trustworthy information. In addition, the pandemic has put journalists at the frontline of supplying essential health information to massively expanded audiences in need of reporting they could trust, yet at the same time, the ensuing collapse in economic activity decimated advertising revenues, leaving public interest media vulnerable to bankruptcy or to takeover by media barons with a political agenda. Another paradox is that while seven in ten journalists have reported hugely increased stress, the research shows that the top three emotional reactions to the pandemic were positive, including a renewed commitment to the profession. Related to the safety of journalists, the research shows that physical attacks against journalists were at a relatively low level in 2020, yet online violence was at an all-time high, and overwhelmingly targeted at women. Finally, in a context where accurate, reliable, and timely information became a matter of life and death, state officials in may contexts, i.e., those people with the most reliable information and greatest responsibility to distribute it, were also the most likely source of inaccurate, unreliable information.

The report concludes with a list of recommendations, which are primarily intended for State officials who exercise authority over the media in their country but also set out actions that international actors and non-governmental organisations could take in supporting public interest media in the wake of the pandemic. In brief (as per the abridged version [PDF]), the recommendations include:

• "Tax Big Tech companies fairly, instead of allowing them to pay little to no tax on revenues earned, and use the extra money to subsidise public interest media. This will help to ensure the post-COVID survival of public interest media and its crucial role fulfilling human rights.
• Fully respect core human rights to freedom of expression and access to information, including proactive disclosure of reliable, life-saving health information, only restricting such rights for the limited situations and durations permitted under international law.
• Impose targeted international sanctions on individuals responsible for grave human rights violations, including arbitrary detention and torture of journalists, especially in cases where a path to impunity has been laid.
• Counter the epidemic of misinformation and violence on social media, particularly with a gendered dimension targeted at women journalists, not through censorship but by supporting fact-checking as a public good and reforming hate speech laws to enable prosecution of online assault.
• Leverage the demand for reliable information by training public interest journalists in Media and Information Literacy. A better command of critical analytical skills will allow journalists to differentiate from competitors and better harness technologies to engage audiences and counter misinformation."

Appendix A in the report offers a discussion on the advantages of a human-rights-based approach to an analysis of the impact of the pandemic on public interest media, as well as an outline of the appropriate and key human rights set out in the major treaties of IHRL. Appendix B includes a survey of opinions from journalists, interviewed by IMS, on the status of public interest media in their respective countries by the end of the year of pandemic.