COVID-19, the media, and communication scholarship: adequate concepts for the crisis or a crisis of concepts?

Abstract

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic sparked a tremendous interest in the scienti fi c com-munity that not only massively increased scienti fi c output in general (see ‘ paperdemic ’ ; Valencise et al., 2022; see Lin & Nan, 2022 speci fi cally for Communication). Across the board, some claimed that these publications also included ‘ faster ’ case reports, comments, editorials, or letters to the editor (Carvalho et al., 2020) that simultaneously represent the lowest levels of the evidence pyramid with a higher risk of bias (Murad et al., 2016). In Communication, special issues have tackled speci fi c aspects of the global pandemic (e.g. Nan & Thompson, 2021; Ratzan, 2020), and in this special issue of the Annals of the ICA, we aimed at taking the current COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to re fl ect upon key concepts in Communication. In fast-paced times like these, it seemed relevant to us to take a step back and re fl ect on whether the most prominent concepts in Communication were, are, and will be helpful to not only address the current challenges still posed by COVID-19, but also future crises. The four peer-reviewed papers featured in this special issue address important conceptual take-aways from past experiences and provide a perspective for the future taking COVID-19 as an opportunity to re fl ect about core concepts in communication across the fi eld ’ s subdisciplines. In the fi rst paper (alphabetical order), Holbert et al. discuss the COVID-19 pandemic against the backdrop of four conceptually di ff erent, theoretically relevant boundary conditions that are highly informative for theory building. Holbert et al. fi rst introduce external vs. internal as