Getting Over COVID: A Cross-National Comparison of Pandemic Press Coverage

• In Event: The Transnational Lives of Dead Bodies (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section)

Abstract

This paper is a component of a much larger project examining decreasing levels of fear and apprehension about COVID-19. It seeks to understand the social process by which the COVID dead turn into statistics and news stories, and how those statistics and news stories eventually come to be seen as mundane or unthreatening to the larger population. It reports the results of longitudinal content analysis of COVID news coverage in three American news outlets--the New York Times, Washington Post, and US Today. It then compares those results with a similar content analysis of coverage in the Times of India.

Author

• Timothy Recuber, Smith College