News Coverage of Covid-19 and Swine Flu: A Corpus-Assisted Study

Abstract

The progression rate of Covid-19 and Swine Flu to the advanced pandemic level intensified the risk and damage to human fatalities. Since their outbreak, media outlets spared no effort in reporting news and updates about the two diseases. This study investigates the representations of Covid-19 and Swine Flu pandemics in The New York Times and The Guardian newspapers by utilizing a corpus linguistic quantitative approach. The most monthly read article was collected over one year since the two diseases were declared pandemics by the World Health Organization. The data were compiled in a corpus and analysed using Wordsmith software based on the concordances and the frequency list of the top 15 frequent words in each pandemic. The frequency lists generated 9 themes including: reporting verbs, titles, places, quantity expressions, people, disease name, prevention and control, impact and modal verbs. The study found that news tended to spread fear among people and highlight the governments' roles during Covid-19 pandemic more than Swine Flu.