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. 2022 Nov 24;10(12):2362.
doi: 10.3390/healthcare10122362.

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

Rifat Afrin  1 , Ahasan Harun  2 , Gayle Prybutok  1 , Victor Prybutok  3
Affiliations

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

Rifat Afrin et al. Healthcare (Basel). .

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; community health; health communication; newspapers.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Co-occurrence network for USA Today.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Co-occurrence network for The Monitor.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Co-occurrences within three words’ distance: nouns and adjectives (USA Today).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Words following one another (USA Today).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Keywords (noun, pronoun, verb, adjective) identified by RAKE (USA Today).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Co-occurrences within three words’ distance: nouns and adjectives (The Monitor).
Figure 7
Figure 7
Words following one another (The Monitor).
Figure 8
Figure 8
Keywords (noun, pronoun, verb, adjective) identified by RAKE (The Monitor).
Figure 9
Figure 9
Number of words representing the sentiment dimensions (USA Today).
Figure 10
Figure 10
Number of words representing the sentiment dimensions (The Monitor).
Figure 11
Figure 11
A radar chart of emotional valence.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Top word distributions for each emotional valence (USA Today).
Figure 13
Figure 13
Top word distributions for each emotional valence (The Monitor).
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