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Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication

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),...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Chipidza, Wallace, Akbaripourdibazar, Elmira, Gwanzura, Tendai, Gatto, Nicole M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cambridge University Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8129680/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33653437
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2021.65
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author Chipidza, Wallace
Akbaripourdibazar, Elmira
Gwanzura, Tendai
Gatto, Nicole M.
author_facet Chipidza, Wallace
Akbaripourdibazar, Elmira
Gwanzura, Tendai
Gatto, Nicole M.
author_sort Chipidza, Wallace
collection PubMed
description 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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spelling pubmed-81296802021-05-18 Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication Chipidza, Wallace Akbaripourdibazar, Elmira Gwanzura, Tendai Gatto, Nicole M. Disaster Med Public Health Prep Original Research 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. Cambridge University Press 2021-03-03 /pmc/articles/PMC8129680/ /pubmed/33653437 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2021.65 Text en © Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc. 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Research
Chipidza, Wallace
Akbaripourdibazar, Elmira
Gwanzura, Tendai
Gatto, Nicole M.
Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication
title Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication
title_full Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication
title_fullStr Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication
title_full_unstemmed Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication
title_short Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication
title_sort topic analysis of traditional and social media news coverage of the early covid-19 pandemic and implications for public health communication
topic Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8129680/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33653437
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2021.65
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