DEMORESILDIGITAL RESEARCH ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC PART III: Pandemic News

DEMORESILDIGITAL RESEARCH ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC PART III: Pandemic News

Svenja Boberg, Thorsten Quandt, Tim Schatto-Eckrodt and Lena Frischlich published the white paper “Pandemic News: Facebook Pages of Mainstream News Media and the Coronavirus Crisis – a Computational Content Analysis” on the platform arxiv.org.  The study analyzes the Facebook messages of journalistic news media during the early Coronavirus crisis, based on a large German data set from January to March 2020. Using computational content analysis methods, reach and interactions, topical structure, relevant actors, negativity of messages, as well as the coverage of fabricated news and conspiracy theories were examined. The topical structure of the near-time Facebook coverage changed during various stages of the crisis, with just partial support for the claims of critics. The initial stages were somewhat lacking in topical breadth, but later stages offered a broad range of coverage on Corona-related issues and societal concerns. Further, journalistic media covered fake news and conspiracy theories during the crisis, but they consistently contextualized them as what they were and debunked the false claims circulating in public. While some criticism regarding the performance of journalism during the crisis received mild empirical support, the analysis did not find overwhelming signs of systemic dysfunctionalities. Overall, journalistic media did not default to a uniform reaction nor to sprawling, information-poor pandemic news, but they responded with a multi-perspective coverage of the crisis.


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