Portraying the Pandemic: Analysis of Textual-Visual Frames in German News Coverage of COVID-19 on Twitter

ABSTRACT

The novel coronavirus disease (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) resulted in a severe global pandemic in 2020. Amid the unprecedented health crisis, visuals play important roles in media framing and health crisis communication. This article provides one of the first analyses of textual-visual news concerning COVID-19 posted by two leading German newspapers on Twitter. Our objective is to integrate texts and visuals into framing analysis to better understand the multimodal news presentation of health crises. A quantitative content analysis of 2479 tweets examined nine news frames, among which politics and instructions, update information, economic impact and social impact presented more thematic salience. The semiotic signs of indexical, symbolic and iconic appeared in news visuals and served evidential, performative and illustrative functions. The results also detected recurrent news visuals in the color-clustered patterns. Notably, an alluvial diagram revealed the connections between textual frames and visual signs across three crisis phases. In recognizing the diverse roles of visuals in constructing mediated reality, this article demonstrates the value in the multimodal framing of health crises and suggests expanding our focus to risk cultures for future international comparative research.

KEYWORDS:

• Health crisis
• framing
• visual framing
• visual semiotics
• COVID-19
• emerging infectious diseases
• content analysis

Acknowledgment

The previous version of this paper was accepted and presented at the 72nd. annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA, 2022). Meanwhile, the article was selected as the “Top Student Paper” award by the Visual Communication Studies Division.

Disclosure Statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 The Robert Koch Institute is a German federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention. The daily situation reports about the COVID-19 can be retrieved on website: https://www.rki.de/EN/Content/infections/epidemiology/outbreaks/COVID-19/Situationsberichte_Tab.html.

2 Data availability statement: The dataset and supplemental materials (codebook, reliability, R file) of this research can be access via: https://osf.io/h8ek6/?view_only=26a663e4f25b45a2b2d51dfbd5025716.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under project number 458225198.