Negotiating trust through COVID-19 press briefings

Abstract

Drawing from televised COVID-19 press briefings, this study explicates how the interplay between verbal and visual resources help policy makers restore public trust following organization-level failures by neutralizing unfavorable discourses that threaten the public’s perceptions of their competence, integrity and benevolence and by emphasizing positive aspects associated with these factors. The findings reveal that these mediated multimodal speeches not only prioritize the political interests of the government by apportioning blame for the surveillance failures, while aggrandizing their ad hoc responses without addressing the causes. This trust repair practice serves to frame the pandemic – initially as an external biosecurity threat and subsequently as a natural and expectable characteristic of an infectious disease that can be handled – hinging largely on the creation of “us-them,” which undermines equitable public health objectives and transmission mitigation in the long run.