*1.2. Research Hypothesis 2 and Hypothesis 3*

In public health crises, people believe that as much information as possible can help them understand the severity of the crisis which, in turn, helps them take protective action, reduce anxiety, and promote control over the situation [33]. In practice, however, public anxiety and stress for large-scale health crises may also be created by the media itself, the so-called media panic, which exists in different media sources, including newspapers, TV, radio, and the Internet. [34]. Although different types of media may have different effects on coping, little is known about the relationship between media source preference and audience response to large-scale pandemics [3].

Among many media sources, new media has become a research focus because new media platforms have been considered one of the most commonly used information resources [35]. Existing studies have shown that new media exposure may cause anxiety during a large-scale pandemic [16,36,37]. New media networks provide a new approach for combining and exchanging information [38], making it easy for Internet users, such as official departments, self-media, and netizens, to release and transfer related information on online media, which may lead to (mis)information overload and, in turn, cause individuals' health problems, such as anxiety [6,33,37]. Compared with traditional media, the information quality of new media is out of control. Moreover, the interactive nature of new media is more likely to cause negative "emotional contagion" in disasters, which may cause new media users to experience more negative psychological effects [39]. Accordingly, we explore the relationship between different media sources and COVID-19 anxiety and propose the following hypotheses:
