Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity

The current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media; in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is one o...

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Autores principales:	Reuben Ng, Yi Wen Tan
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	MDPI AG 2021
Materias:	COVID-19 pandemic newspapers cultural values text as data public health Medicine R
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/ba886c25d4684104b9b74430ccbd89de
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:ba886c25d4684104b9b74430ccbd89de2021-11-25T17:48:11ZDiversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity10.3390/ijerph1822117681660-46011661-7827https://doaj.org/article/ba886c25d4684104b9b74430ccbd89de2021-11-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/22/11768https://doaj.org/toc/1661-7827https://doaj.org/toc/1660-4601The current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media; in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is one of the first known studies to operationalize news media diversity and examine its association with cultural values during the pandemic. We tracked the global diversity of COVID-19 coverage in a news media database of 12 billion words, collated from 28 million articles over 7000 news websites, across 8 months. Media diversity was measured weekly by the number of unique descriptors of 10 target terms of the pandemic (e.g., COVID-19, coronavirus) and normalized by the corpus size for the respective countries per week. Government Stringency was taken from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and cultural scores were taken from Hofstede’s Cultural Values global database. Results showed that Media Diversity Rate increased 6.7 times over 8 months, from the baseline period (October–December 2019) to during the pandemic (January–May 2020). Mixed effects modelling revealed that higher COVID-19 prevalence rates and governmental stringency predicted this increase. Interestingly, collectivist cultures are linked to more diverse media coverage during COVID-19. It is possible that news outlets in collectivist societies are motivated to present a diverse array of topics given the impact of COVID-19 on every segment of society. Of broader significance, we provided a framework to design targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced.Reuben NgYi Wen TanMDPI AGarticleCOVID-19pandemicnewspaperscultural valuestext as datapublic healthMedicineRENInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol 18, Iss 11768, p 11768 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	COVID-19 pandemic newspapers cultural values text as data public health Medicine R
spellingShingle	COVID-19 pandemic newspapers cultural values text as data public health Medicine R Reuben Ng Yi Wen Tan Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity
description	The current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media; in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is one of the first known studies to operationalize news media diversity and examine its association with cultural values during the pandemic. We tracked the global diversity of COVID-19 coverage in a news media database of 12 billion words, collated from 28 million articles over 7000 news websites, across 8 months. Media diversity was measured weekly by the number of unique descriptors of 10 target terms of the pandemic (e.g., COVID-19, coronavirus) and normalized by the corpus size for the respective countries per week. Government Stringency was taken from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and cultural scores were taken from Hofstede’s Cultural Values global database. Results showed that Media Diversity Rate increased 6.7 times over 8 months, from the baseline period (October–December 2019) to during the pandemic (January–May 2020). Mixed effects modelling revealed that higher COVID-19 prevalence rates and governmental stringency predicted this increase. Interestingly, collectivist cultures are linked to more diverse media coverage during COVID-19. It is possible that news outlets in collectivist societies are motivated to present a diverse array of topics given the impact of COVID-19 on every segment of society. Of broader significance, we provided a framework to design targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced.
format	article
author	Reuben Ng Yi Wen Tan
author_facet	Reuben Ng Yi Wen Tan
author_sort	Reuben Ng
title	Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity
title_short	Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity
title_full	Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity
title_fullStr	Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity
title_full_unstemmed	Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity
title_sort	diversity of covid-19 news media coverage across 17 countries: the influence of cultural values, government stringency and pandemic severity
publisher	MDPI AG
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/ba886c25d4684104b9b74430ccbd89de
work_keys_str_mv	AT reubenng diversityofcovid19newsmediacoverageacross17countriestheinfluenceofculturalvaluesgovernmentstringencyandpandemicseverity AT yiwentan diversityofcovid19newsmediacoverageacross17countriestheinfluenceofculturalvaluesgovernmentstringencyandpandemicseverity
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Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity

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