Lives from the newspaper Le Monde

[Shishirgano9]

The media quickly understood the dual need of the public — to be informed — but also to be entertained during a particularly anxiety-provoking period. Communities have emerged online , animated by the media who accompany their audiences during confinement.


Our confined (and now, deconfined)

Fear has always been a good amplifier for disinformation . The ios database unprecedented volume of fake news illustrates the virality of disinformation in times of crisis. Here again, collaboration is the basis for success. Public service media have launched the Flashlight initiative, a Telegram group where fact-checking teams and the EBU Social Newswire can share the news they have worked on. The Trusted News Initiative involves several major global newsrooms.



Behind the data, the interpretation

This crisis also shows very well that the only way to understand what is happening is to look at the data . Data scientists are more important than ever to put the mass of data arriving from all over the world into an understandable format. They come in different formats: raw data , collected by several sources in countries (hospitals, administrations, associations, retirement homes, etc.), data processed in relative or absolute terms , data with simulators . The resources of John Hopkins University have established themselves as a reference during the crisis. But contrary to what one might believe, the figures are not neutral. Since each country does not measure the same thing, it is all the more important not to be satisfied with creating magnificent dataviz, but also to explain the methodology used and the sources of the data displayed.