What is newsworthy about Covid-19? A corpus linguistic analysis of news values in reports by China Daily and The New York Times
Siyang Liu and
Hailing Yu ()
Additional contact information
Siyang Liu: Hunan University
Hailing Yu: Hunan University
Palgrave Communications, 2023, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-11
Abstract:
Abstract Integrating corpus linguistic analysis with news values, this article investigates how the Covid-19 pandemic in different countries is represented as newsworthy by China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT), two news outlets with different cultural and political backgrounds. A distinction is made between reports on the pandemic in the newspaper’s home country and reports on the pandemic in other countries. Three corpus linguistic techniques, i.e., keywords list, collocation, and concordance, are used to analyze the headlines and leads of 2572 news reports published in 2020 and 2021. Analysis results show that when presenting the pandemic in domestic news, CD tends to highlight Proximity, Positivity, and Personalization, whereas NYT gives more prominence to Eliteness and Personalization. When the pandemic in other countries is presented, CD foregrounds Negativity, Impact, Superlativeness, and Eliteness, whereas NYT focuses on Negativity, Impact, and Proximity. Compared with NYT, CD shows a stronger tendency to adopt positive self-representation and negative other-representation in its coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Apart from the analysis results, the significance of the study also lies in its demonstration of the applicability of a corpus linguistic approach to news values analysis.
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-023-02241-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:10:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-023-02241-5
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about
DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-02241-5
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().