BACKGROUND
Understanding what shapes risk perception of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 pandemic is associated with vaccine uptake, especially in vaccine hesitant countries like the United States. In health psychology and behavior, media is an amplifying force that shapes risk perception. In addition, the media landscape is constantly changing over time. While numerous studies have focused on social media, there is a paucity of research on traditional news media. This study analyzes traditional news media over time, across the political and regional spectrum, and assesses its implications on COVID-19 vaccine risk perception.
OBJECTIVE
To differentiate political and regional topics of COVID-19 vaccine messaging via topic modeling for U.S. online newspapers and tie the findings to the literature on health psychology and public health.
METHODS
News from twelve popular platforms in the U.S. were pulled using Newscatcher’s News API from the period of May 1, 2020 to February 28, 2022. The news entries were filtered for vaccine news, pre-processed for topic models (lemmatized, identified bi- and trigrams), then topic modeled. To compare across publications, word clouds, word-to-topic models, and Jaccard matrices were qualitatively analyzed.
RESULTS
All publications decreased in COVID-19 news reporting over the period (ranging from 20% of all news to about 2%) but increased in vaccine-related news across four periods (ranging from 2.9% to about 62.2% of all COVID-19 related news). There are several repeating topics across all publications: case counting nationally, case counting by state, death counts, vaccination counts, vaccination in children, vaccination, and reopening (restaurants, businesses, schools), and vaccine mandates.
CONCLUSIONS
The framings suggest that the important indicator of the severity and susceptibility – concepts in the PADM and EPPM – in the pandemic is a preoccupation with case numbers and death counts. Diminishing perceived severity and susceptibility is tied to vaccination, since it is coupled with conversations about reopening school, businesses, and restaurants. There is no partisan distinction based on political leaning or locality of publication, contrary to popular belief on the partisanship of news outlets.