When it comes to the role the media can play - good and bad - during a global pandemic, look no further than Italy: The second country to be gripped by COVID-19 and the first in which news outlets are, in any meaningful sense, free from state control.

The nationwide lockdown has been in effect for more than a month, but the government has made an exception for reporters, deeming their work an essential service.

As might be expected in these extraordinary times, the task of serving the public interest - never more vital - has also been fraught with complexity for Italian journalists.

One challenge has been gauging the boundaries of what constitutes ethical, or responsible journalism during a public health emergency of such unprecedented scale.

An outlet judged to have exceeded those limits is Corriere della Sera, Italy's most widely-read newspaper. On March 8, the day before the northern region of Lombardy, Italy's COVID-19 epicentre, went into lockdown, the paper published an early draft of the government decree ordering the province's 16 million inhabitants to stay indoors.

"That leak generated immediately a frenzy," Mattia Ferraresi, a reporter for the conservative-leaning daily Il Foglio, told The Listening Post's Daniel Turi.

"According to a newspaper called Il Fatto Quotidiano, that pushed 41,000 people to move around the country in a moment when it was absolutely crucial that people would respect orders and not move around to avoid spreading the virus."

Another battle has been the barrage of misinformation ricocheting around the internet - from WhatsApp forwards playing down the virus's potency to viral videos claiming it was cooked up in a laboratory by one great power or another.

Giulia Bosetti is a reporter for Presa Diretta, an investigative publication on the publicly-owned TV channel Rai 3 which has been debunking COVID-19 myths: "For example, the same day our programme was broadcast, a Rai TV report from 2015 about a coronavirus created in a Chinese lab started circulating again. But it was about a completely different virus … Literally in the space of a few hours, Salvini - the leader of the Lega party and our former deputy prime minister - actually asked a question in parliament requesting it to be investigated … It only took us a few interviews with doctors and scientists to prove that it was totally fake news."

The pandemic has paused what had been a lengthy period of decline for traditional media in Italy - especially for newspapers, whose sales have fallen more or less continuously since the 1990s.

If the rise of the internet is the underlying factor in that trend, a powerful catalyst has been the breakdown of public trust in mainstream news sources over the same period. A report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last year underlined the depth of the deficit: Just 40 percent of the Italians polled said they trusted the news media - a figure the report describes as "particularly low" - while just one-third thought the media scrutinised the powerful well.

That, however, was pre-COVID-19. The confinement of 60 million people inside their homes - and in need of reliable information - has gifted Italy's news industry with something previously unthinkable: A, literally, captive audience.

Carlo Verdelli, editor-in-chief at Italy's leading centre-left broadsheet, La Repubblica, explains the effect on the paper's circulation: "Before the coronavirus, we averaged approximately three million unique visitors a day. Now on our busiest days we reach 14-15 million visitors."

Sales of physical copies have also increased, Verdelli says, despite the closure of thousands of newsstands.

For Rai 3's Giulia Bosetti, it is a chance for Italy's legacy media to start winning back that lost faith: "This is the moment when television journalism, and print as well, can regain the trust of their listeners and readers by offering up different kinds of journalism - daily updates with the latest facts and figures, including the number of deaths - but also reporting that tries to understand the root of the problems we now face."

Produced by: Daniel Turi

Contributors:

Mattia Ferraresi - reporter, Il Foglio

Giulia Bosetti - investigative journalist, Rai 3

Carlo Verdelli - editor-in-chief, La Repubblica

Source: Al Jazeera News