ABSTRACT
During the first wave of Covid-19 information decoupling could be observed in the flow of news media content. The corollary of the content alignment within and between news sources experienced by readers (i.e., all news transformed into Corona-news), was that the novelty of news content went down as media focused monotonically on the pandemic event. This all-important Covid-19 news theme turned out to be quite persistent as the pandemic continued, resulting in the, from a news media's perspective, paradoxical situation where the same news was repeated over and over. This information phenomenon, where novelty decreases and persistence increases, has previously been used to track change in news media, but in this study we specifically test the claim that new information decoupling behavior of media can be used to reliably detect change in news media content originating in a negative event, using a Bayesian approach to change point detection.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and implementation of vaccines. Here, we examine how health authorities and governments most effectively motivate the public by focusing on a specific race: between the Alpha variant and the implementation of the first generation of COVID-19 vaccinations in the winter of 2021. Following prior research on crisis communication, we focus on appeals to fear and hope using communicative aids in the form of visualizations based on epidemiological modelling. Using a population-based experiment conducted in United States (N = 3,022), we demonstrate that a hope-oriented visual communication aid, depicting the competing effects on the epidemic curve of (1) the more infectious variant and (2) vaccinations, motivates public action more effectively than a fear-oriented visual communication, focusing exclusively on the threat of the new variant. The importance of the implementation of such hope-oriented messages is further highlighted by cross-national representative surveys from eight countries (N = 3,995), which demonstrate that feelings of fear towards the Alpha variant alone were insufficient to activate strong compliance in isolation. Overall, these findings provide general insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
Content alignment in news media was an observable information effect of Covid-19's initial phase. During the first half of 2020, legacy news media became "corona news" following national outbreak and crises management patterns. While news media are neither unbiased nor infallible as sources of events, they do provide a window into socio-cultural responses to events. In this paper, we use legacy print media to empirically derive the principle News Information Decoupling (NID) that functions as an information signature of culturally significant catastrophic event. Formally, NID can provide input to change detection algorithms and points to several unsolved research problems in the intersection of information theory and media studies.