Exercising control in media during Covid-19: the “Stay at Home” campaign on Twitter in Greece

Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis ()
Additional contact information
Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis: Hong Kong Baptist University

Palgrave Communications, 2024, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract In 2020, the Greek government initiated the “Stay at Home” Campaign (or “Petsas’ list”), a fund for supporting the country’s media industry due to financial issues provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, the campaign would promote the message of staying at home to stop spreading Covid-19. However, that initiative seemed to have been perceived as a manipulation effort to control the news media in order to support an ideal image of the government, including defending the excessive pandemic restrictions (e.g., lockdowns and the prohibition of music in restaurants and bars). The current study employs Ideological Discourse Analysis (IDA) to investigate the online anti-media sentiment empowered by the “Stay at Home” Campaign. It focuses on the Twitter users’ ideological constructions emphasizing on the positive depictions of one group (i.e., the government and the media) against the “other” (i.e., the public) in 1623 Tweets of the relevant hashtag in Greek #Petsas_list (#Λιστα_Πετσα) on Twitter. The results showed that financial support when used in a controversial and non-transparent way, could undermine media independence and empower anti-media sentiment. Lastly, the study enhances the literature about the mass media industry’s problems globally, including the decline in media freedom that contributes to the democratic recession.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-024-03240-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:11:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-024-03240-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-03240-w

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().