What the public wants in COVID news vs. what the press provides

But researchers based in Paris have looked into the dynamics of pandemic news and found a potential contributor: Unreliable news sources were better at producing content that matched what readers were looking for.The researchers behind the new work treated the news ecosystem as a function of supply and demand. The database isn't a complete list of unreliable sources, so this shouldn't be considered a comprehensive analysis of the misinformation landscape.For the demand side, they turned to Google Trends, which tracks the search terms people are interested in and the information they're looking to discover. Even when compared to reliable online news outlets, the unreliable ones tended to be quicker to place stories that reflected search terms.The researchers also looked at other search terms that appeared simultaneously as "coronavirus"—things like "coronavirus N95 mask." When this context was considered, it turned out that articles from questionable sources fit the public's interest better than the general news media.