In 2020, the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, Covid-19, gripped the global news cycle.1 As people attempted to understand the risks and consider the implications, they eagerly sought information. All forms of media, from newspaper to broadcast to social, responded to meet that demand. In addition to the media reporting on the healthcare challenges and responses to Covid-19, the pandemic appeared to influence the discussion of almost all topics at the height of the crisis. Consideration of Covid-19 permeated coverage of everything from politics and elections to education and the family, from professional sports to culture and the arts, from economics and commerce to law enforcement and the courts.2 A notable theme of coverage for legal scholars that emerged across numerous contexts was the protection of privacy and data protection in the wake of the pandemic. As discussed in this article, much of the coverage was related to technological responses to the crisis, including the switch to remote work and education and proposals for digitised contact tracing. Privacy and data protection issues also arose in coverage of media reporting, mandated testing, and vaccines. This research sought to examine the representation of privacy and data protection in the Covid-19 context through a case study of Irish Times coverage during the acute stage of the pandemic. Analysis was conducted on articles sourced from LexisNexis that were published from January 2020 to July 2021, and coding was done using NVivo software. The focus on a single broadsheet, the ‘paper of record’, narrows the lens of the study, and may under-represent different perspectives. The decision to limit scope in this way was made to facilitate the close study of the leading outlet for coverage of privacy and data protection issues in the Covid-19 context. The analysis carried out demonstrates that privacy and data protection were not marginalised during the public health emergency. Indeed, the findings reveal predominantly positive or neutral portrayals, particularly in discussions concerning Covid-19 contact tracing applications, where data protection was presented as essential for public trust. This article highlights the educative role of the media, suggesting that more rights-focused coverage is desirable to ensure that privacy and data protection are anchored in fundamental-rights discourse.