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The current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media; in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is one of the first known studies to operationalize news media diversity and examine its association with cultural values during the pandemic. We tracked the global diversity of COVID-19 coverage in a news media database of 12 billion words, collated from 28 million articles over 7000 news websites, across 8 months. Media diversity was measured weekly by the number of unique descriptors of 10 target terms of the pandemic (e.g., COVID-19, coronavirus) and normalized by the corpus size for the respective countries per week. Government Stringency was taken from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and cultural scores were taken from Hofstede’s Cultural Values global database. Results showed that Media Diversity Rate increased 6.7 times over 8 months, from the baseline period (October–December 2019) to during the pandemic (January–May 2020). Mixed effects modelling revealed that higher COVID-19 prevalence rates and governmental stringency predicted this increase. Interestingly, collectivist cultures are linked to more diverse media coverage during COVID-19. It is possible that news outlets in collectivist societies are motivated to present a diverse array of topics given the impact of COVID-19 on every segment of society. Of broader significance, we provided a framework to design targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced.

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Background Current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media, in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information—that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is the first-known study to investigate the impact of cultural values and pandemic severity on media attention towards COVID-19. Findings lay the groundwork for targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced. Objective We investigated the impact of cultural values and pandemic severity on Media Attention towards COVID-19 across 18 countries. Methods We tracked the global volume of COVID-19 coverage (to measure media attention) over 8 months in a news media database of 12 billion words with 30 million articles from over 7,000 news media sites. Predictors of Media Attention towards COVID-19 came from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (incidence and mortality) and Hofstede’s Cultural Values. Results Media attention toward COVID-19 increased 55 times over 8 months. Higher rates of new cases and deaths predicted this exponential increase. Countries with higher power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation, were associated with increased media attention, controlling for covariates. Conclusions Cultural values play a significant role in the news media’s attention toward COVID-19, controlling for pandemic severity. We provided a framework to design targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced.