Analyzing Spanish News Frames on Twitter during COVID-19—A Network Study of El País and El Mundo

Abstract

While COVID-19 is becoming one of the most severe public health crises in the twenty-first century, media coverage about this pandemic is getting more important than ever to make people informed. Drawing on data scraped from Twitter, this study aims to analyze and compare the news updates of two main Spanish newspapers El País and El Mundo during the pandemic. Throughout an automatic process of topic modeling and network analysis methods, this study identifies eight news frames for each newspaper’s Twitter account. Furthermore, the whole pandemic development process is split into three periods—the pre-crisis period, the lockdown period and the recovery period. The networks of the computed frames are visualized by these three segments. This paper contributes to the understanding of how Spanish news media cover public health crises on social media platforms.