Paris (AFP)
The Covid-19 generated unprecedented coverage in the French media, according to studies by the National Audiovisual Institute (Ina) and the media watch platform Tagaday (ex Press'edd).
The Ina Media Review published on Thursday an analysis of the total airtime devoted to this health crisis in the television news. More than 8,000 hours of programs broadcast on the news channels and 400 hours on the historic channels, from December 1 to March 19, were thus screened, representing a total corpus of nearly 100 million words.
Main conclusion: "the media coverage of the Covid-19 and its consequences is an absolutely unprecedented phenomenon in the history of television news", say Antoine Bayet and Nicolas Hervé, the authors of this study.
In terms of news channels, they note in particular that they devoted almost 75% of their airtime to Covid-19 last week. According to them it is a "vertiginous and historic peak in its intensity and length", because for the first time a media "blast" (deflagration) sets in over a long time, instead of calming down after a few hours or days.
The JT of the historical chains, them, little by little came to devote themselves in their "quasi-entirety" to the coronavirus, they raise.
The other subjects "must fight to exist", like the first round of municipal elections on March 15 (the 4 news channels devoted 69% of their airtime to the coronavirus that day).
And according to them, the "dead-kilometer law", which would like the public to be more interested in a death occurred nearby, rather than in more numerous but distant deaths, "is still verified" in the programs of info: the first death of a Frenchman, on February 26, caused the airtime devoted to the coronavirus to explode, when that of the first death in France, a Chinese tourist, on February 14th, only resulted in a "slight increase".
For its part, the Tagaday media monitoring platform (formerly Press'edd), analyzed the place devoted to the coronavirus in the written and web press, using a sample of 3,000 titles and websites from the French media.
And she believes that "mirroring the sideration that strikes all of society, this media phenomenon exceeds in volume and media pressure all the news of magnitude of the recent period (yellow vests, last presidential election)", with more 254,000 mentions recorded in the French press from January 1 to March 19.
© 2020 AFP