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COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts
Newspapers and other mass media outlets are critical in shaping public opinion on a variety of contemporary issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines how the pandemic is portrayed in the news and how the public reacted differently in the West and East using archival data from Face...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
PeerJ Inc.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9575862/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36262131 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1111 |
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author | Pratama, Ahmad R. Firmansyah, Firman M. |
author_facet | Pratama, Ahmad R. Firmansyah, Firman M. |
author_sort | Pratama, Ahmad R. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Newspapers and other mass media outlets are critical in shaping public opinion on a variety of contemporary issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines how the pandemic is portrayed in the news and how the public reacted differently in the West and East using archival data from Facebook posts about COVID-19 news by English-language mass media between January 2020 and April 2022 (N = 711,646). Specifically, we employed the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (Vader) to measure the news tone on each COVID-19 news item shared on Facebook by mass media outlets. In addition, we calculated a polarity score based on Facebook special reactions (i.e., love, angry, sad, wow, haha, and care) received by each post to measure public reactions toward it. We discovered that people in Western countries reacted significantly more negatively to COVID-19 news than their East counterparts, despite the fact that the news itself, in aggregate, generally contained a relatively similar level of neutral tone in both West and East media. The implications of these distinctions are discussed in greater detail. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9575862 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-95758622022-10-18 COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts Pratama, Ahmad R. Firmansyah, Firman M. PeerJ Comput Sci Data Science Newspapers and other mass media outlets are critical in shaping public opinion on a variety of contemporary issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines how the pandemic is portrayed in the news and how the public reacted differently in the West and East using archival data from Facebook posts about COVID-19 news by English-language mass media between January 2020 and April 2022 (N = 711,646). Specifically, we employed the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (Vader) to measure the news tone on each COVID-19 news item shared on Facebook by mass media outlets. In addition, we calculated a polarity score based on Facebook special reactions (i.e., love, angry, sad, wow, haha, and care) received by each post to measure public reactions toward it. We discovered that people in Western countries reacted significantly more negatively to COVID-19 news than their East counterparts, despite the fact that the news itself, in aggregate, generally contained a relatively similar level of neutral tone in both West and East media. The implications of these distinctions are discussed in greater detail. PeerJ Inc. 2022-09-28 /pmc/articles/PMC9575862/ /pubmed/36262131 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1111 Text en © 2022 Pratama and Firmansyah https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Computer Science) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. |
spellingShingle | Data Science Pratama, Ahmad R. Firmansyah, Firman M. COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts |
title | COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts |
title_full | COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts |
title_fullStr | COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts |
title_full_unstemmed | COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts |
title_short | COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts |
title_sort | covid-19 mass media coverage in english and public reactions: a west-east comparison via facebook posts |
topic | Data Science |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9575862/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36262131 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1111 |
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