The blessing and the curse of Journalists - Learn 9

-    Managing Panic in Pandemic    -

For me, this is the most important point. The text tells about the power of journalist and how they can help to manage a pandemic. If it is right or not, but a lot of people believe that the journalists will rather tell us the truth than politicians. And so, they believe them.

So politicians can use this channel to reach the people during a pandemic. Journalists are both a blessing and a curse. They can help to inform the people and also a little bit to educate them behave right in a critical situation, but they can also cause panic by publishing half knowledge and craving for sensations.

Anyhow, you will need the journalists when you want to manage a pandemic. For a government a pandemic is hard cause of two things:

1. They have to find a way to reach people, to inform them, to help them and to guarantee a nearly normal day routine
2. Everything they do, it will be wrong

Well, for the second problem there won’t be a solution I think, this is the luck of the opposition “experts” who feel not affected: they can bring a wh*** of good solutions, but they don’t have the responsibility for the follows.

For the first problem the government can use the journalists:

• They have the public trust
• They are the push technology for the government (the government can find a receiver for their message over journalists)
• We don't deal with what we house in our minds, yet we really need to pay attention to it. (Journalists have the impact to influence our behavior)
• psychological first aid (good things will happen if journalists do them because they have the opportunities).

They can bring:

• Safety is about removing people from a threat
• Calming happens when you want to lower the state of arousal so people can function, concentrate and take concrete steps towards what they need to do to protect themselves.
• Connection: People's basic need to connect with others and not be isolated needs to be attended to.
• Efficacy occurs when someone is capable of taking action on their own. When they do so as a member of a group, that's collective efficacy.
• Hope: The idea that the world is predicable and we will get through it, that's hope.

But the most important thing is not only to ask how we can influence people, but also to ask “do we influence people by writing/sending this story and is it the right way?

And when Journalist will follow this way, they will be the most important part to manage a pandemic to bring back a normal life as fast as possible.