Framing of COVID-19 in Newspapers: A Perspective from the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

The degree to which the media report a health emergency affects the seriousness with which the people respond to combat the health crisis. Engagement from local newspapers in the US has received scant scrutiny, even though there is a sizable body of scholarship on the analysis of COVID-19 news. We fill this void by focusing on the Rio Grande Valley area of the US-Mexico border. To understand the differences, we compared such local news coverage with the coverage of a national news outlet. After collecting the relevant news articles, we used sentiment analysis, rapid automatic keyword extraction (RAKE), and co-occurrence network analysis to examine the main themes and sentiments of COVID-19 news articles. The RAKE identified that county-specific news or local regulations are more prevalent among the key terms in The Monitor which are absent in USA Today. The co-occurrence network shows the coverage of the disruption of sports season in USA Today which is not present in The Monitor. The sentiment analysis presents fear emotion is more dominant in USA Today, but trust emotion becomes more prevalent in The Monitor news coverage. These findings show us that, although the subject of the health emergency is the same, local and national newspapers describe it in different ways, and the sentiments they convey are also not the same.

Episodic versus thematic media framing of violence against social leaders and human rights defenders in Colombia

“…The differences in media framing based on media type are relevant findings in Colombia since marginalised communities in rural areas rely heavily on radio as their primary news source. Our results show that radio tends to employ a more episodic frame, which aligns with Afrin et al's (2022) findings that local media often focus on reporting the specific details of news events, while national media take a more explanatory approach by looking at the bigger picture. This is a crucial issue to consider given that rural areas in Colombia are often hotspots for violence against SLHRD.…”

“…For example, a news outlet that has a particular political bias may choose to present news in a way that supports that bias, which can result in a skewed or incomplete representation of the fact. These differences impact significantly on public perceptions and actions (Afrin et al, 2022; Bleich et al, 2015; Cárdenas, 2022; Herrera, 2021; Peksen et al, 2014).…”