Skip to main content

Sourcing Pandemic News: A Cross-National Computational Analysis of Mainstream Media Coverage of COVID-19 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Mellado, C., Hallin, D., Luis, C., Rodrigo, A., Jackson, D., Humanes, M.L., Márquez-Ramírez, M., Mick, J., Mothes, C., I-Hsuan LIN, C., Lee, M., Alfaro, A., Isbej, J. and Ramos, A., 2021. Sourcing Pandemic News: A Cross-National Computational Analysis of Mainstream Media Coverage of COVID-19 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Digital Journalism, 9 (9), 1261-1285.

Full text available as:

[img]
Preview
PDF
Sourcing Pandemic News DJ for web.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.

1MB

DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2021.1942114

Abstract

This article explores the uses of sources in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media posts of mainstream news organizations in Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Based on computational content analysis, our study analyzes the sources and actors present in more than 940,000 posts on COVID-19 published in the 227 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 78 sampled news outlets between January 1 and December 31 of 2020, comparing their relative importance across countries, across media platforms, and across time as the pandemic evolved in each country. The analysis shows the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms, particularly in Latin America, demonstrating a strong role of the state in constructing pandemic news and suggesting that mainstream news organizations' social media posts maintain a strong elite orientation. Health sources were also prominent — consistent with the defining role of biomedical authority in health coverage—, while significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on. Our results also revealed that the use of specific sources significantly varied over time. These variations tend to go hand in hand with specific global milestones of the pandemic.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:2167-0811
Uncontrolled Keywords:Covid-19 ; social media ; journalism ; news sources ; facebook ; twitter ; instagram
Group:Faculty of Media & Communication
ID Code:35812
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:21 Jul 2021 09:37
Last Modified:13 Jan 2023 01:08

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

More statistics for this item...
Repository Staff Only -