[…]
This document offers recommendations for tackling these new challenges, alongside several examples of best practices. These are aimed at three main groups of stakeholders who play important roles in ensuring the effectiveness of health crisis communication: public health authorities and government officials, media regulators and policy makers, and news organisations and journalists. They will also be of relevance to think thanks and other actors involved in public health. The recommendations are informed by the findings of the PANCOPOP project, which examined health crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on four countries that were led by populist leaders at the beginning of the pandemic – Brazil, the USA, Poland, and Serbia. Although the sample is limited and the four countries all represent cases of right-wing populism, they encompass disparate types of approaches to the pandemic and also differ on a variety of other relevant dimensions.
This diversity enables us to draw reasonably robust conclusions about the impact of populism on health crisis communication. The project was developed by an international team of scholars with expertise in political communication, public health, media policy and international relations,[3] and was supported by public research funding agencies associated with the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities, as part of the “Recovery, Renewal and Resilience in a Post-pandemic World” programme.
