Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication
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Abstract
Objective:
To characterize and compare early coverage of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in newspapers, television, and social media, and discuss implications for public health communication strategies that are relevant to an initial pandemic response.
Methods:
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), an unsupervised topic modeling technique, analysis of 3271 newspaper articles, 40 cable news shows transcripts, 96,000 Twitter posts, and 1000 Reddit posts during March 4-12, 2020, a period chronologically early in the timeframe of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Results:
Coverage of COVID-19 clustered on topics such as epidemic, politics, and the economy, and these varied across media sources. Topics dominating news were not predominantly health-related, suggesting a limited presence of public health in news coverage in traditional and social media. Examples of misinformation were identified, particularly in social media.
Conclusions:
Public health entities should use communication specialists to create engaging informational content to be shared on social media sites. Public health officials should be attuned to their target audience to anticipate and prevent spread of common myths likely to exist within a population. This may help control misinformation in early stages of pandemics.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.05.20146894: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization Each word in a document is randomly assigned to a topic, and this process repeats conditioned on the current topic distribution. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:A limitation of our approach is that we selected a specific time frame to conduct our analyses, which was …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.05.20146894: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization Each word in a document is randomly assigned to a topic, and this process repeats conditioned on the current topic distribution. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:A limitation of our approach is that we selected a specific time frame to conduct our analyses, which was relatively early in the pandemic. Continued analysis of media coverage of the pandemic could suggest additional interpretations. Further, to understand coverage on social media, we analyzed Twitter and Reddit content; future research could explore coverage on other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Pandemic preparedness should include communication plans which are ready and can be activated during early days of the disease’s entry and spread into a population(Pan American Health Organization, 2009; World Health Organization, 2017). Part of preparedness could include some ready-made general informational and educational materials that could be quickly deployed, or at a minimum, templates should be available to facilitate their rapid development and publishing. For COVID-19, early indications of a novel coronavirus causing respiratory illness could have prompted public health entities to release such readied educational materials on covering coughs and sneezes. Our analysis showed instances of myths being perpetuated in social media (e.g., smoking making lungs inhospitable to coronavirus). Materials that are poised for use should anticipate common myths likely to exist within a population. This should be possible if public health entities are well-acquainted with their target audience in advance of a pandemic, as is recommended(Pan American Health Organization, 2009...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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