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During the COVID-19 pandemic, local news organizations have played an important role in keeping communities informed about the spread and impact of the virus. We explore how political, social media, and economic factors impacted the way local media reported on COVID-19 developments at a national scale between January 2020 and July 2021. We construct and make available a dataset of over 10,000 local news organizations and their social media handles across the U.S. We use social media data to estimate the population reach of outlets (their “localness”), and capture underlying content relationships between them. Building on this data, we analyze how local and national media covered four key COVID-19 news topics: Statistics and Case Counts, Vaccines and Testing, Public Health Guidelines, and Economic Effects. Our results show that news outlets with higher population reach reported proportionally more on COVID-19 than more local outlets. Separating the analysis by topic, we expose more nuanced trends, for example that outlets with a smaller population reach covered the Statistics and Case Counts topic proportionally more, and the Economic Effects topic proportionally less. Our analysis further shows that people engaged proportionally more and used stronger reactions when COVID-19 news were posted by outlets with a smaller population reach. Finally, we demonstrate that COVID-19 posts in Republican-leaning counties generally received more comments and fewer likes than in Democratic counties, perhaps indicating controversy.
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MAKING GOOD NEWS: WHAT EXPLAINS THE QUALITY OF COVERAGE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT*
When social movement organizations receive extensive newspaper coverage, why is it sometimes substantive and sometimes not? By “substantive,” we mean coverage that reflects serious treatment of the movement's issues, demands, or policy claims. Scholars agree that the news media are key to movement organizations' influence, helping them alter public discourse and effect political change, but often find that protests are covered nonsubstantively. Employing insights from literatures on historical institutionalism, the social organization of the news, and the consequences of movements, we elaborate an “institutional mediation” model that identifies the interactive effects on coverage of news institutions' operating procedures, movement organizations' characteristics and action, and political contexts. Although movement actors suffer compound legitimacy deficits with journalists, the institutional mediation model identifies the openings news institutions provide, the movement organizational characteristics, the forms of collective action likely to induce substantive news treatment, and the political contexts that will amplify or dampen these effects. We derive four interactive hypotheses from this model, addressing the effects of organizational identities, collective action, and political contexts on news outcomes. We appraise the hypotheses with comparative and qualitative comparative analyses of more than 1000 individually coded articles discussing the five most-covered organizations of the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement across four national newspapers. We find support for each hypothesis and discuss the implications for other movement organizations and the current media context.
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- PAR ID:
- 10151934
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Mobilization: An International Quarterly
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1086-671X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 19 to 37
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-24-1-19
