Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: Sep 27, 2022
Date Accepted: May 2, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 28, 2023
News Coverage of Face Masks in Australia During the Early COVID-19 Pandemic: A Topic Modeling Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, online media coverage of preventative strategies proliferated substantially. News media was constantly informing people about changes in public health policy and practices such as mask-wearing. Hence, exploring the news media agenda on face mask use is warranted to analyze circulated topics and their trends.
Objective:
The aim of the study is to examine news related to face masks as well as to identify related topics and temporal trends in Australian online news media during the early COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
Following data collection from Google news platform, a trend analysis on the mask-related news titles from Australian news publishers was conducted. Then, a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling algorithm was applied along with evaluation matrices (quantitative and qualitative measures). Lastly, topic trends were developed and analyzed in the context of mask use during the pandemic.
Results:
A total of 2345 face-mask-related eligible news titles were collected from 25 January 2020 to 25 January 2021. Mask-related news showed an increasing trend corresponding to increasing COVID-19 cases in Australia. The best-fitted LDA model discovered 8 different topics with a coherence score of 0.66 and perplexity measure of −11.29. The major topics were T1 (mask-related international affairs), T2 (introducing mask mandate in places such as Melbourne and Sydney), and T4 (anti-mask sentiment). Topic trends revealed that T2 was the most frequent topic in January 2021 (77 news titles), corresponding to the mandatory mask-wearing policy in Sydney.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrated that Australian news media reflected a wide range of community concerns about face masks, peaking as COVID-19 incidence increased. Harnessing the news media platforms for understanding community concerns and sentiment may assist in effective health communication during a pandemic response.
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