COVID-19 coverage by women more credible than by men, study

Women produce trustworthy news reports on COVID-19 than men according to research findings released last month by The Factual – a California based tech firm that gauges the credibility of news outlets.

Speaking to VOA, Philip Meylan, a political analyst at The Factual, revealed that female reporters dominate the top 25 most trusted journalists reporting on the coronavirus pandemic at 19 out of 25.

“Why are eight of them female out of 10? And so if you see that once, it's kind of incidental. You think, okay, well, that, you know, it's just random. It's what I chose. But we saw it over and over and over again,” he said.

Meylan further expressed confidence in female reporting saying that female journalists were actually underrepresented (only 41%) in the total sample alluding that the findings could have been better in favour of them. Nearly 60% of the COVID-19 stories reviewed by The Factual were by male reporters. A total of 39, 084 articles from 167 news outlets were reviewed by the firm over 135 days.

“What those numbers tell us overall is just that, at least when it comes to coronavirus, female journalists have been more neutral in their tone," Meylan said. "They've been better resourced, and they've overall just produced better articles.”

The Factual relies on artificial intelligence algorithm to determine credibility of news content basing on the history of trustworthiness of a publication. It also considers an author’s deliverable by looking at the sources as well as the tone they have used. If a piece grosses 75% and above, it is considered very credible.

Nonetheless, the analyst clarified that the findings don’t mean that consumers of news content on COVID-19 should only consider content by female journalists.

“[The numbers don’t mean] you should go to just read female journalists on coronavirus. But we saw it as an inroad to looking at why female journalists are underrepresented when it comes to anywhere in journalism, and how that may be affecting our news quality overall.

“So if female journalists face challenges, face more obstacles, basically, when going out to do stories, whether it's on coronavirus or the recent protests, how is this affecting our news output? And how is it affecting the overall narratives?” He said.