Manifestation of Panic in Mass Media: COVID-19 Case in Lithuania

Mass media has a huge influence on masses. It shapes people's mindset, attitudes, and often their actions in certain situations. Mass media has massive control over the mindset especially during the crises and emergencies. Mass media provides most important source of information in our society about: politics, economics, health care, entertainment, crime, and so on. Existing modern larger television broadcast networks and news portal news components known from the global COVID-19 pandemic. The key research question- whether the use of mass media power was used just for the COVID-19 news spread or it was used to the intimidation of public in order to increase the media ratings overall? This topic is very sensitive, and then various recommendations are made to the media: economic recessions, health care courses, political rankings, and so on. Having manipulative power, media channels, their editors and journalists, headlines, reports, videos that could easily raise fear and moral panic among all members. The purpose of the research is to analyze panic manifestation case of COVID-19 in Lithuanian and global mass media channels. Research method, used in the article The results of the study revealed that manifestation of panic was observed in all selected channels, but news of a global media organizations were more constructive and accurate and local media channels were more focused on intimidation and to the amount of news.