What is newsworthy about Covid-19? A corpus linguistic analysis of news values in reports by China Daily and The New York Times

Abstract

Integrating corpus linguistic analysis with news values, this article investigates how the Covid-19 pandemic in different countries is represented as newsworthy by China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT), two news outlets with different cultural and political backgrounds. A distinction is made between reports on the pandemic in the newspaper’s home country and reports on the pandemic in other countries. Three corpus linguistic techniques, i.e., keywords list, collocation, and concordance, are used to analyze the headlines and leads of 2572 news reports published in 2020 and 2021. Analysis results show that when presenting the pandemic in domestic news, CD tends to highlight Proximity, Positivity, and Personalization, whereas NYT gives more prominence to Eliteness and Personalization. When the pandemic in other countries is presented, CD foregrounds Negativity, Impact, Superlativeness, and Eliteness, whereas NYT focuses on Negativity, Impact, and Proximity. Compared with NYT, CD shows a stronger tendency to adopt positive self-representation and negative other-representation in its coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Apart from the analysis results, the significance of the study also lies in its demonstration of the applicability of a corpus linguistic approach to news values analysis.