ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses broadly the challenges and opportunities for anthropologically engaging with the news media during a pandemic. It explores the Swedish experience, describing how the country was portrayed as reckless and irresponsible and the ways in which Swedish culture was used and misused to explain its handling of the pandemic. Anthropologists rely on news sources, to “set the scene,” to corroborate facts, and to describe dominant discourses. The temporality of rapid, real-time ethnography allows for a depth that post-event research does not allow, but it misses the wider understanding-at-a-distance that future research on COVID-19 will have. The chapter discusses the author's own frustrations and experiences with the research relied on by the media, and concludes with reflections on how anthropologists and other researchers could and should engage with the media.
