Pandemic News: Facebook Pages of Mainstream News Media and the Coronavirus Crisis -- A Computational Content Analysis

The unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented challenge for news media around the globe. While journalism is meant to process yet unknown events by design, the dynamically evolving situation affected all aspects of life in such profound ways that even the routines of crisis reporting seemed to be insufficient. Critics noted tendencies to horse-race reporting and uncritical coverage, with journalism being too close to official statements and too affirmative of political decisions. However, empirical data on the performance of journalistic news media during the crisis has been lacking thus far. The current 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 structu

27 May 2020 ... Important: e-prints posted on arXiv are not peer-reviewed by arXiv; they should not be relied upon without context to guide clinical practice or ...

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