JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Before the advent of an effective vaccine, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as mask wearing, social distancing and lockdown have been the primary measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Such measures are highly effective when there is high population wide adherence, which requires information on current risks posed by the pandemic alongside a clear exposition of the rules and guidelines in place.

Objective:

Here we analyse online news media coverage of COVID-19. We quantify the total volume of COVID-19 articles, their sentiment polarization and leading subtopics, to act as a reference to inform future communication strategies.

Methods:

We collected 26 million news articles from the front pages of 172 major online news sources in 11 countries (available at sciride.org). Using topic detection we identified COVID-19-related content to quantify the proportion of total coverage the pandemic received in 2020. Sentiment analysis tool Vader was employed to stratify the emotional polarity of COVID-19 reporting. Further topic detection and sentiment analysis was performed on COVID-19 coverage to reveal the leading themes in pandemic reporting and their respective emotional polarizations.

Results:

We find that COVID-19 coverage accounted for approximately 25% of all front-page online news articles between January and October 2020. Sentiment analysis of English-speaking sources reveals that overall COVID-19 coverage is not exclusively negatively polarized, suggesting a wide heterogeneous reporting of the pandemic. Within this heterogenous coverage, 16% of COVID-19 news articles (or 4% of all English-speaking articles) can be classified as highly negatively polarized, citing issues such as death, fear or crisis.

Conclusions:

The goal of COVID-19 public health communication is to increase understanding of distancing rules and maximize the impact of any governmental policy. Our results suggest an information overload in COVID-19 reporting that could risk obscuring effective policy communication. Our data and analysis will inform health communication strategies to minimize the risks of COVID-19 while vaccination is rolled out.