Sourcing Pandemic News: A Cross-National Computational Analysis of Mainstream Media Coverage of COVID-19 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Mellado, Claudia; Hallin, Daniel C.; Cárcamo, Luis; Alfaro, Rodrigo; Jackson, Daniel; Humanes, María Luisa; Márquez-Ramírez, Mireya; Mick, Jacques; Mothes, Cornelia; Lin, Christi I-Hsuan; Lee, Misook; Alfaro, Amaranta; Isbej, José; Ramos, A Reynaldo

doi:10.1080/21670811.2021.1942114

Cited by 71 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…For example, Zunino (2019) examined sources in the digital media in Argentina, one of its results was that they are neither diverse nor plural. This conclusion is similar in Chile, Mellado et al (2021) found that the use of sources in Chile is associated with political elites, above the observable quota in other Latin American countries such as Mexico or Brazil.…”

Section: Gender's Sources: Who Supplies Firsthand Information?supporting

confidence: 64%

Gender (in)equality in Chilean press: journalists and sources

Mensa

Vernier

Ulloa

et al. 2021

RCom

Self Cite

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Who writes the news in the Chilean press according to gender? Who are the sources, male or female, in the Chilean press? Is there a relationship between the gender of journalists and the gender of the sources in the Chilean press? This article studies the gender of the Chilean newsroom and their sources in 12,113 news through a quantitative method with a computational social science approach. This method combines web scraping and natural language processing techniques to gather and preprocess data, facilitating the exploration of complex social phenomena. Results show important biases in journalists and source gender. From a sample of 158 journalists, 99 were men (63%) and 59 women (37%). Also, from 12,113 news, 7,565 (62%) were written by male and 4,548 (38%) by female journalists. Of the 12,334 sources mentioned in the news, 9,771 were men (79%) and 2,563 were women (21%). A significant finding is that equality in the newsroom is related to how female and male journalists choose their sources. In other words, when a media has a newsroom with gender equality, the sources of the journalists are more equitable too. These results have important insights to discuss within the journalism schools, to make students aware of the gender bias in the profession. Furthermore, if the presence of female – journalists or sources- increased in the media, it would allow them to grow their media power and status.

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Section: Gender's Sources: Who Supplies Firsthand Information?supporting

confidence: 64%

Gender (in)equality in Chilean press: journalists and sources

Mensa

Vernier

Ulloa

et al. 2021

RCom

Self Cite

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“…In an ongoing study of the soundtracks from Western news coverage of the pandemic at the first major sites of infection and quarantine, such as Wuhan (China), Tehran (Iran), and Milan (Italy), researchers have found that the distribution of sound, silence, and music differs regionally and nationally [ 27 ]. Meanwhile, mainstream news organizations’ social media posts of different countries maintain a strong elite orientation [ 28 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Media Bias and Factors Affecting the Impartiality of News Agencies during COVID-19

Luo

Han

et al. 2022

Behavioral Sciences

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When COVID-19 was raging around the world, people were more fearful and anxious. In this context, the media should uphold impartiality and shoulder the responsibility of eliminating misinformation. Therefore, our research adopted sentiment analysis technologies to analyze the impartiality of news agencies and analyzed the factors that affect the impartiality of COVID-19-related articles about various countries. The SentiWordNet3.0 and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) models were employed to analyze the articles and visualize the data. The following conclusions were redrawn in our research. During the pandemic, articles of some news agencies were not objective; the impartiality of news agencies was related to the reliability of news agencies instead of the bias of news agencies; there were obvious differences in the coverage and positivity of international news agencies to report the performance of COVID-19 prevention and control in different countries.

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“…In recent empirical research based on aggregated Facebook data, scholars have found strong correlations between social ties (i.e., social connectedness via Facebook friendship) and the regional spread of COVID-19 in the US as well as Italy (Bailey et al, 2020 ; Kuchler et al, 2020 ). Furthermore, Twitter and web news data have been used to predict COVID-19 outbreaks (Jahanbin and Rahmanian, 2020 ; Mellado et al, 2021 ). Given the local origin of a new virus and higher controllability of outbreaks at a local scale, transnational mobility is seen as responsible for the growing risks that infectious diseases constitute for an increasingly globalized world.…”

Section: State Of Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging Dynamic Heterogeneous Networks to Study Transnational Issue Publics. The Case of the European COVID-19 Discourse on Twitter

Schünemann

Brand²,

König³

et al. 2022

Front. Sociol.

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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a critical phase for the transnationalization of public spheres. Against this backdrop, we ask how transnational COVID-19 related online discourse has been throughout the EU over the first year of the pandemic. Which events triggered higher transnational coherence or national structuration of this specific issue public on Twitter? In order to study these questions, we rely on Twitter data obtained from the TBCOV database, i.e., a dataset for multilingual, geolocated COVID-19 related Twitter communication. We selected corpora for the 27 member states of the EU plus the United Kingdom. We defined three research periods representing different phases of the pandemic, namely April (1st wave), August (interim) and December 2020 (2nd wave) resulting in a set of 51,893,966 unique tweets for comparative analysis. In order to measure the level and temporal variation of transnational discursive linkages, we conducted a spatiotemporal network analysis of so-called Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs). HINs allow for the integration of multiple, heterogeneous network entities (hashtags, retweets, @-mentions, URLs and named entities) to better represent the complex discursive structures reflected in social media communication. Therefrom, we obtained an aggregate measure of transnational linkages on a daily base by relating these linkages back to their geolocated authors. We find that the share of transnational discursive linkages increased over the course of the pandemic, indicating effects of adaptation and learning. However, stringent political measures of crisis management at the domestic level (such as lockdown decisions) caused stronger national structuration of COVID-19 related Twitter discourse.

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Sourcing Pandemic News: A Cross-National Computational Analysis of Mainstream Media Coverage of COVID-19 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Cited by 71 publications

References 62 publications

Gender (in)equality in Chilean press: journalists and sources

Gender (in)equality in Chilean press: journalists and sources

Media Bias and Factors Affecting the Impartiality of News Agencies during COVID-19

Leveraging Dynamic Heterogeneous Networks to Study Transnational Issue Publics. The Case of the European COVID-19 Discourse on Twitter

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