Why did citizens adhere to the strict measures imposed by national authorities during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020? One part of the answer is the way the first press conferences constituted the situation as an urgent crisis and the authorities as legitimate leaders in charge. This chapter examines the rhetoric of government press conferences in Scandinavia during the initial outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. I discuss the press conference as a rhetorical genre and establish the studied press conferences as instances of a subgenre of the political press conference: the justifying press conference. Phases, procedures, and aims of this subgenre are defined, and the arrival phase is particularly examined. This chapter demonstrates how the multimodal aspects of the press conferences contributed to constituting the pandemic as an emergency and establishing the ethos of the authorities as active and responsible. This constitution functioned as a multimodal justification of the measures and actions taken and the legitimising of the power of the authorities in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.