Media system dependency and change in risk perception during the COVID-19 pandemic

On February 27, 2020 the first case of COVID-19 contagion was detected in Mexico, and by the end of March phase 2 of the epidemic had been de-clared in the country when local trans-mission was detected. In a context of crisis and uncertainty like the one de-scribed, a risk perception tends to arise among the population that fears to be affected personally, to a large extent due to the influence exerted by the me-dia by information they provide about the contingency, which derives from the media system dependency that occurs in the population. In order to determine the risk perception present in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the influence that media consumption had on the population’s attitude, an online analytical survey was carried out with 630 Mexican re-spondents. The results present a popu-lation with a relatively low risk percep-tion, but with a moderate dependency when it comes to getting information about everything that has to do with the pandemic. In addition, it is pos-sible to observe that this dependency tends to generate an increase, in an indirect manner, in the risk perception through the consumption of television, digital press and Facebook.