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Politics overwhelms science in the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from the whole coverage of the Italian quality newspapers.

ABSTRACT: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emerged as one of the most dramatic health crises of recent decades. This paper treats mainstream news about the current pandemic as a valuable entry point for analyzing the relationship between science and politics in the public sphere, where the outbreak must be both understood and confronted through appropriate public-health policy decisions. In doing so, the paper aims to examine which actors, institutions, and experts dominate the SARS-CoV-2 media narratives, with particular attention to the roles of political, medical, and scientific actors and institutions within the pandemic crisis. The study relies on a large dataset consisting of all SARS-CoV-2 articles published by eight major Italian national newspapers between January 1, 2020 and June 15, 2020. These articles underwent a quantitative analysis based on a topic modeling technique. The topic modeling outputs were further analyzed by innovatively combining ad-hoc metrics and a classifier based on the stacking ensemble method (combining regularized logistic regression and linear stochastic gradient descent) for quantifying scientific salience. This enabled the identification of relevant topics and the analysis of the roles that different actors and institutions engaged in making sense of the pandemic. The results show how the health emergency has been addressed primarily in terms of political regulation and concerns and only marginally as a scientific matter. Hence, science has been overwhelmed by politics, which, in media narratives, exerts a moral as well as regulatory authority. Media narratives exclude neither scientific issues nor scientific experts; rather, they configure them as a subsidiary body of knowledge and expertise to be mobilized as an ancillary, impersonal institution useful for legitimizing the expansion of political jurisdiction over the governance of the emergency.

SUBMITTER: Crabu S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8136646 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Policy Points Although immigration policy is recognized as a social determinant of health, less is known about how mechanisms, such as news coverage of policy, influence intermediary and proximal health processes like seeking health care. The extent of news coverage of federal, state, and local exclusionary or integration immigration policies can influence public agendas regarding immigrant inclusion and exclusion. Exclusionary federal immigrant policies have dominated the news across the United States over the past ten years, despite active immigrant integration policymaking at national, state, and local levels.ContextImmigration policymaking at federal, state, and local levels in the United States has proliferated in the past decade. While evidence demonstrates that immigration policy is a determinant of health, there has been limited examination of the mechanisms by which policy influences proximal health processes. News coverage has served as a central platform for debates over restrictive and inclusive immigration policies and may constitute an important health mechanism by shaping public agendas, influencing support for immigrant exclusion or inclusion, and framing policy issues, thereby influencing immigrants' social climates. This study sought to examine the extent of news coverage of exclusionary and inclusive immigration policy at federal and state levels and variations in messages about immigrants during two periods of extensive policymaking.MethodsWe conducted a quantitative content analysis of newspapers' coverage of immigration policy between 2010 and 2013 and between 2017 and 2019. We conducted a systematic NewsBank search of articles covering legislation, lawsuits, and other policies related to immigration (n = 931). Articles were coded for policy type and level, positive or negative framing of immigrants, and other characteristics. Our analysis then compared the patterns of the two periods.ResultsIn both periods, the majority of coverage focused on exclusionary policies at the federal level, despite a significant increase in integration policies between 2017 and 2019. We found significant shifts in both the negative and positive framing of immigrants, from the dominant negative messages of immigrants as an economic drain to immigrants as criminals and the dominant positive messages of immigrants' economic contributions to immigrants as families.ConclusionsSince 2010, coverage of exclusionary federal policy has consistently dominated the news, as messages have increasingly described immigrants as either criminals or part of families. We discuss the health implications and future research directions of news coverages' role in influencing the immigration policy and social contexts that have been linked to health outcomes.

Project description:ObjectiveThe COVID-19 pandemic is the first pandemic where social media platforms relayed information on a large scale, enabling an "infodemic" of conflicting information which undermined the global response to the pandemic. Understanding how the information circulated and evolved on social media platforms is essential for planning future public health campaigns. This study investigated what types of themes about COVID-19 were most viewed on YouTube during the first 8 months of the pandemic, and how COVID-19 themes progressed over this period.MethodsWe analyzed top-viewed YouTube COVID-19-related videos in English from December 1, 2019 to August 16, 2020 with an open inductive content analysis. We coded 536 videos associated with 1.1 billion views across the study period. East Asian countries were the first to report the virus, while most of the top-viewed videos in English were from the US. Videos from straight news outlets dominated the top-viewed videos throughout the outbreak, and public health authorities contributed the fewest. Although straight news was the dominant COVID-19 video source with various types of themes, its viewership per video was similar to that for entertainment news and YouTubers after March.ResultsWe found, first, that collective public attention to the COVID-19 pandemic on YouTube peaked around March 2020, before the outbreak peaked, and flattened afterwards despite a spike in worldwide cases. Second, more videos focused on prevention early on, but videos with political themes increased through time. Third, regarding prevention and control measures, masking received much less attention than lockdown and social distancing in the study period.ConclusionOur study suggests that a transition of focus from science to politics on social media intensified the COVID-19 infodemic and may have weakened mitigation measures during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is recommended that authorities should consider co-operating with reputable social media influencers to promote health campaigns and improve health literacy. In addition, given high levels of globalization of social platforms and polarization of users, tailoring communication towards different digital communities is likely to be essential.

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Politics overwhelms science in the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from the whole coverage of the Italian quality newspapers.

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