U.S. and New Zealand Media Framing of the Coronavirus Pandemic

Abstract

How the media frame an issue is important for informing the public about the risks and associated preventative measures which need to be adopted. Furthermore, how the media frame an issue is important for informing peoples perceptions, such as perceptions about who is responsible for something, and informing views on the severity of an issue. A well established body of scholarship have lent credence to the important role that the media have in informing the public about an array of issues. For example, the public primarily receive information about climate change and health related issues through the mass media. This same dynamic was seen in regard to the Coronavirus pandemic, where the public were informed by the media on a mysterious outbreak in Wuhan, China. This study set out to explore how media in the U.S. and New Zealand framed the Coronavirus pandemic. Two key development phases in the pandemic’s genealogy are examined. The first is COVID-19 reaching pandemic status, and the second is the confirmation of a Coronavirus case in the U.S. and New Zealand. Both periods were crucial in the interest levels of global media in regard to the virus, as well as being important periods where the public heavily relied on the media for information about the origins of the virus, the transmissibility of it, mortality rate, and for information about actions at international, national and local scales which will be erected in response to COVID-19. This study employed a Framing Analysis to explore the most prominent frame used by media outlets in both nations to report COVID-19. In doing this, this thesis was able to identify the most prominent lens in which the media covered the two sample periods. This study also compared and contrasted the content focusses of U.S. and New Zealand outlets, which provide insight into what each nation prioritised as COVID-19 transitioned from an epidemic to a global pandemic, and then as the virus spread in the community. This thesis found that, in sample period one, U.S. and New Zealand framing were chiefly concerned with the consequences of the virus on different sectors of each nation’s economy. Reporting of the second sample period showed differences in the frames in which each nation adopted, where U.S. outlets adopt a medical lens, and outlets in New Zealand focus on societal implications. Key conclusions of this research is that early in the development of COVID-19, the media politicised the virus, by what they focused their reporting on and how they labelled the virus as it evolved.