South African newspaper coverage of COVID-19: A content analysis

Herman Wasserman · Wallace Chuma · Tanja Estella Bosch · Chikezie Emmanuel Uzuegbunam

34 citations0/0 files storedJournal of African Media Studies

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Communication and COVID-19 Impact Media Studies and Communication Public Relations and Crisis Communication

Abstract

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has led to unprecedented media coverage globally and in South Africa where, at the time of writing, over 20,000 people had died from the virus. This article explores how mainstream print media covered the COVID-19 pandemic during this time of crisis. The news media play a key role in keeping the public informed during such health crises and potentially shape citizens’ perceptions of the pandemic. Drawing on a content analysis of 681 front-page news stories across eleven English-language publications, we found that nearly half of the stories used an alarmist narrative, more than half of the stories had a negative tone, and most publications reported in an episodic rather than thematic manner. Most of the stories focused on impacts of the pandemic and included high levels of sensationalism. In addition, despite the alarmist and negative nature of the reporting, most of the front-page reports did not provide information about ways to limit the spread of the virus or attempt to counter misinformation about the pandemic, raising key issues about the roles and responsibilities of the South African media during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study shows that South African newspaper coverage of COVID-19 was largely negative, possibly to attract audience attention and increase market share, but that this alarmist coverage left little possibility for citizens’ individual agency and self-efficacy in navigating the pandemic.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

References

2023Types, sources, and claims of Covid-19 misinformation 2005Disease metaphors in new epidemics: the UK media framing of the 2003 SARS epidemic 1996Race and Poverty in America: Public Misperceptions and the American News Media 2020Communicating health crisis: a content analysis of global media framing of COVID-19 2020Effects of misleading media coverage on public health crisis: a case of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in China 2012From Press Release to News: Mapping the Framing of the 2009 H1N1 A Influenza Pandemic 2018Spreading Ebola Panic: Newspaper and Social Media Coverage of the 2014 Ebola Health Crisis 2013Pandemic alarm in the Dutch media: Media coverage of the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic and the role of the expert sources

Cited by

2023Journalistic Role Performance in Times of COVID 2021Competing or Complimentary Actors in the Journalistic Field? An Analysis of the Mediation of the COVID-19 Pandemic by Mainstream and Peripheral Content Creators in Zimbabwe 2023Comparing Journalistic Role Performance Across Thematic Beats: A 37-Country Study 2023Institutional crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland. A qualitative study of the experiences of representatives of public health organizations

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.