Health Journalists’ Views of Their Work amid a Pandemic and U.S. Partisan Political Conflict

Geography played an outsized role in shaping the experiences of individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this was true in the United States (Tan et al. 2020) as it was for other regions of the world. The pandemic also set off a sea change in the journalism workplace, and this was triply so for health and science journalists who were reliant on political leaders as sources (Bernadas and Ilagain 2020). While the United States is not typically thought of as a conflict zone, we argue that in terms of antagonistic political partisanship, health journalists in the United States were caught up in partisan “conflict zones,” which affected regions of the country differently. While the United States benefited from access to vaccines more quickly than many places in the Global South, the U.S. context was fraught with political divides that hampered the efforts of local public health agencies, which, in turn, strapped journalists who were eager to access public health data to inform their communities.