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An ongoing infodemic: How people in eight countries access news and information about Coronavirus a year into the pandemic | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

In this report, we use survey data collected in April 2021 to document and understand how people in eight countries (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the US) accessed news and information about COVID-19 more than a year into the global pandemic. We examine how they rate the trustworthiness of the different sources and platforms they rely on, how much misinformation they say they encounter, and how they see vaccines. For six of the countries (where we have comparable data from April 2020), we track changes over the last year.

We find that:

  • In almost all countries, news organisations are the single most widely used source of information about coronavirus. Furthermore, news organisations have become even more central to how people stay informed about coronavirus in the last year because, while overall reach has declined compared to earlier in the pandemic, the reach of other sources has declined more.

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Source: An ongoing infodemic: How people in eight countries access news and information about Coronavirus a year into the pandemic | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism