Because people make important decisions about healthcare based on the information in stories about health topics, the way health information is reported and presented by news outlets is critically important (Schwitzer et. al., 2005). Various studies show that journalists play down or amplify certain frames or emotional appeals when disseminating information in a public health crisis (Lee & Basnyat, 2013; Rodelo 2021; Hubner, 2021; Zhang, 2021; Xi, Chen, & Ng, 2021).

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THEORY

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Entman points out in his 1993 germinal article that media organizations use frames to “define problems,” “diagnose causes,” “make moral judgments,” and “suggest remedies” (p. 52). A frame is defined by what it brings to light as well as what it strategically leaves out, or as Entman puts it, frames “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text” (p. 52). In journalistic health stories, this process of selection and salience can play out in a variety of ways. For example, Lee and Basnyat (2013) followed government press releases and how the information contained within the releases was framed in Singaporean news stories during the H1N1 A influenza pandemic in 2009. They found that as the information moved from press release to news story, its framing grew more distinct or pivoted entirely, such as flipping a loss frame to a gain frame. They also discovered that journalists were rejecting nearly two-thirds of public health agency press releases. This is a good example of selection, and leaving some things out to influence framing. Lee and Basnyat speculate that the uncertain and risk-heavy nature of a pandemic emboldens journalists to act more as advocates for public health organizations and protocols rather than as objective observers (p. 129). Lee and Basnyat’s study provides crucial background on the practices of reporting pandemics. This study and many of the others that have been conducted on the COVID-19 pandemic reference Lee and Basnyat, as they show how pandemics can amplify the importance of health journalism (2013).

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COVID-19

 

The onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 later added new dimensions to Lee and Basnyat's findings and to our understanding of how news organizations choose to frame this type of public health crisis. Hubner (2021) examined media framing of COVID-19 in the months before it was declared a pandemic. That study found that the two news sources examined quoted politicians and citizens more than health officials. Hubner speculated that media framing of the pandemic as political may have contributed to the politicization of the pandemic. Similarly, Zhang (2021) examined the coverage from the New York Times of Wuhan and Italy’s lockdowns during the beginning of 2020. Zhang found that the New York Times had explicitly framed the lockdowns politically (or otherwise embedded political messages in other framings) more often than it centered risk magnitude or science frames. This study adapted some frames for the method from both Zhang and Hubner’s studies, including the Outbreak and Economic Consequence frames. Other frames were altered to better fit the analysis, leading to the creation of the Political Response and Healthcare Response frames.

 

Both Zhang (2021) and Hubner (2021) looked at early coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and found that often, news outlets politicized this public health crisis. Claims made by Schwitzer et. al. (2005) show that this politicization can influence what actions people will choose to take in response to health news, such as whether to get a vaccine. Bolsen, Druckman, and Cook (2014) showed that when science and scientific innovations are politicized, public trust and support for those innovations decreases. Over the course of the pandemic, misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines was found to increase vaccine hesitancy (Machado, 2021), which has led to a so-called “pandemic of the unvaccinated” (Anthes, 2021). At the time of writing this in March of 2022, unvaccinated individuals are more likely to get infected and to die than vaccinated people (Johnson et. al., 2022). This study adds to the growing body of knowledge about media framing around pandemics. By focusing on the most recent and most consequential COVID-19 wave yet in terms of caseload and death toll, this study examined if and how the framing of the pandemic changed.