Abstract

This article explores the uses of sources in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media posts of mainstream news organizations in Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Based on computational content analysis, our study analyzes the sources and actors present in more than 940,000 posts on COVID-19 published in the 227 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 78 sampled news outlets between January 1 and December 31 of 2020, comparing their relative importance across countries, across media platforms, and across time as the pandemic evolved in each country. The analysis shows the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms, particularly in Latin America, demonstrating a strong role of the state in constructing pandemic news and suggesting that mainstream news organizations' social media posts maintain a strong elite orientation. Health sources were also prominent — consistent with the defining role of biomedical authority in health coverage—, while significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on. Our results also revealed that the use of specific sources significantly varied over time. These variations tend to go hand in hand with specific global milestones of the pandemic.

摘要

本文探讨了在巴西、智利、德国、墨西哥、西班牙、英国和美国主流新闻机构的社交媒体帖子中报道 COVID-19 大流行的来源的使用 基于计算内容分析，我们的研究分析了2020 年 1 月 1 日至 12 月 31 日期间，在 78 个抽样新闻媒体的 227 个 Facebook、Instagram 和 Twitter 帐户中发布的超过 940,000 个 COVID-19 帖子中的来源和参与者，比较了它们在不同国家、不同媒体平台之间的相对重要性，以及随着大流行在每个国家的发展，随着时间的推移。分析显示了跨国家和跨平台的政治资源的主导地位，尤其是在拉丁美洲，这表明国家在构建大流行新闻方面发挥了强大作用，并表明主流新闻机构的 社交媒体帖子保持强烈的精英倾向。健康来源也很突出——这与生物医学权威在健康覆盖中的定义作用一致——而随着大流行的继续，包括公民来源在内的大量来源出现了。我们的结果还表明，特定来源的使用随时间显着变化。这些变化往往与大流行的特定全球里程碑齐头并进。