The Story Behind the Story: Reporting Conditions in China During the Coronavirus Crisis as Told by the Correspondents of El País and ABC

Resumen

This study seeks to investigate the reporting conditions in the early coverage of the coronavirus crisis by the China correspondents of two Spanish newspapers: El País and ABC. After conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the correspondents, this study finds that they only started to focus on the viral outbreak once Wuhan city had been locked down. The interviewed correspondents faced logistical, political, professional and personal challenges while covering coronavirus in China due to the impossibility of entering Wuhan, censorship, difficulties in finding people that would speak to them and the general uncertainty of the situation, respectively. Previous research has studied how El País and ABC’s correspondents covered the coronavirus crisis in China and found that they focused on the response from authorities and that people affected by the virus were usually represented as speechless statistics and, thus, othered. The reporting conditions correspondents encountered helps to understand why the crisis was covered that way.