Media Bias and Factors Affecting the Impartiality of News Agencies during COVID-19

Abstract

When COVID-19 was raging around the world, people were more fearful and anxious. In this context, the media should uphold impartiality and shoulder the responsibility of eliminating misinformation. Therefore, our research adopted sentiment analysis technologies to analyze the impartiality of news agencies and analyzed the factors that affect the impartiality of COVID-19-related articles about various countries. The SentiWordNet3.0 and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) models were employed to analyze the articles and visualize the data. The following conclusions were redrawn in our research. During the pandemic, articles of some news agencies were not objective; the impartiality of news agencies was related to the reliability of news agencies instead of the bias of news agencies; there were obvious differences in the coverage and positivity of international news agencies to report the performance of COVID-19 prevention and control in different countries.

Digital Mass Hysteria during Pandemic? A Study of Twitter Communication Patterns in the US during the Stages of COVID-19 Vaccination

“…The impact of social media on pandemics and vaccine management can be catastrophic for public health [5,6,31]. For instance, when news of the first deaths during the initial vaccine rollout and an uptick in new COVID-19 cases hit the media, this may have exacerbated people's fears, anxiety, helplessness, and frustration about the vaccine [4,32]. This, in turn, can fuel collective fear and hysteria among anxious individuals, leading to conflicts between health authorities and the public [12].…”

“…For example, antivaccine sentiment often stems from concerns about the rapid development of vaccines and their possible side effects, which occurred by misinformation and disinformation spread through social media [19,33]. On the other hand, vaccination advocates focus on the safety and efficacy of vaccines approved by health authorities such as the CDC [32]. On one side of the discourse were right-wing politicians like President Donald Trump, the Republic Party, and his Response Team, often clashing with incumbents like the CDC, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and the Left [32].…”

“…On the other hand, vaccination advocates focus on the safety and efficacy of vaccines approved by health authorities such as the CDC [32]. On one side of the discourse were right-wing politicians like President Donald Trump, the Republic Party, and his Response Team, often clashing with incumbents like the CDC, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and the Left [32]. Antivaccination groups like ICAN increasingly blended with the Far-Right, especially as national elections approached [33,34].…”

Influence of Strategic Crisis Communication on Public Perceptions during Public Health Crises: Insights from YouTube Chinese Media

“…Various studies demonstrate that the effectiveness of crisis response strategies is primarily influenced by the crisis's nature and the characteristics of the involved organization [46,51]. These studies also reveal that the efficacy of crisis communication strategies is dynamic and subject to continual change.…”

“…Evidently, the automated sentiment classifications (neutral, positive, or negative) in 72.56% of cases aligned with the manual identifications by researchers. Owing to the unconventional grammar and complex semantics of Chinese YouTube comments, the results of the model exhibit a relatively high accuracy [46].…”