Citizens' Campus: Governmental crisis communication about the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany.

Katrin Schleicher, M. A. & Johanna Radechovsky, M. A. - TU Ilmenau
Governmental crisis communication about the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany.

Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are investigating, under the direction of Univ.-Prof. Dr. Martin Löffelholz, in a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, how the risk and crisis communication of German governmental authorities and health care organizations is coordinated at the federal, state, and local levels, what problems arise in the process, and how these can be better managed in the future. Document analyses and surveys are used for this purpose. In our presentation, we will present first results from a survey of representatives from the most important institutions such as the RKI and the Corona crisis team, but also from the state chancelleries of selected federal states and from health offices and administrations of counties and independent cities. Our project has two special features: First, we focus on multimodal means of communication, i.e., how public authorities use the combination of text, images, audio, video and graphics in their communication; second, we survey organizations at the federal, state and local levels, thus penetrating the entire federal system in Germany.