Representation of coronavirus in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times

Abstract

Since January of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has received a lot of global media attention. The aim of this thesis is to explore the representation of the pandemic in two highly respected newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The corpus consists of a total of 291 articles from both newspapers. Sketch Engine software is used for the corpus analysis. The introduction discusses the nature of news and points out various factors that influence the process of deciding which news is worth covering. Chapter 1 provides an overview of previous studies on media representation of the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics. Chapter 2 describes the created corpora in greater detail and introduces the method of analysis. The process of conducting the corpus analysis is introduced and the key findings discussed. The conclusion compares the results to previous research and makes recommendations for further research.