The Representation and Politicization of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the Front Pages of the Daily Newspapers of Russia, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, and the United States

Abstract

The impact COVID-19 has demanded an additional effort from the media to report a virus of global reach. During the lockdown, there has been an increase in information consumption derived from the interest and concern of citizens to know the characteristics, development, and threats of the coronavirus. Although social networks have ranked first among the cyberspace platforms most consulted by citizens, different studies indicate that citizens consider newspapers and magazines to have ‘good intentions’ compared to the ‘worst intentions’ of cyber-media and websites. Based on this, the research focuses on the covers of the paper editions of the newspapers, conceived as a fundamental element that synthesizes and hierarchizes the content that each medium considers of greatest importance and that is connected to the digital version of each medium. This research presents a comparative study of the newspaper covers of eight countries in the world (Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, France, Portugal, United States, Russia, and Germany) to analyze the number of news items about the pandemic, the type of text, the typology of information sources, the characters, the use of color, the inclusion and the focus of the photographs or the location on the page, among other parameters. The study analyzes 288 front pages of 16 daily newspapers (2 per country) in the world, collecting 1,478 news items that include 710 pieces of news, and 94,592 pieces of evidence using a mixed method of direct observation and hemerographic analysis. As a result, the few mentions of affected people and health personnel in front page information is evident, as is the predominance of news journalistic genres (brief and news, especially), and the political figures as the most represented actors shows a high degree of politicization of the global crisis. Finally, it is observed that the visual frames in the analyzed newspapers tend to promote humanization through emotional representation.