Anti-Asian Sentiments During the COVID-19 Pandemic Across 20 Countries: Analysis of a 12-Billion-Word News Media Database.

BACKGROUND: US president Joe Biden signed an executive action directing federal agencies to combat hate crimes and racism against Asians, which have percolated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is one of the first known empirical studies to dynamically test whether global societal sentiments toward Asians have become more negative during the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate whether global societal sentiments toward Asians across 20 countries have become more negative, month by month, from before the pandemic (October 2019) to May 2020, along with the pandemic (incidence and mortality rates) and cultural (Hofstede's cultural dimensions) predictors of this trend. METHODS: We leveraged a 12-billion-word web-based media database, with over 30 million newspaper and magazine articles taken from over 7000 sites across 20 countries, and identified 6 synonyms of "Asian" that are related to the coronavirus. We compiled their most frequently used descriptors (collocates) from October 2019 to May 2020 across 20 countries, culminating in 85,827 collocates that were rated by 2 independent researchers to provide a Cumulative Asian Sentiment Score (CASS) per month. This allowed us to track significant shifts in societal sentiments toward Asians from a baseline period (October to December 2019) to the onset of the pandemic (January to May 2020). We tested the competing predictors of this trend: pandemic variables of incidence and mortality rates measured monthly for all 20 countries taken from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, and Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions of Individualism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Masculinity for the 20 countries. RESULTS: Before the pandemic in December 2019, Jamaica and New Zealand evidenced the most negative societal sentiments toward Asians; when news about the coronavirus was released in January 2020, the United States and Nigeria evidenced the most negative sentiments toward Asians among 20 countries. Globally, sentiments of Asians became more negative-a significant linear decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. CASS trended neutral before the pandemic during the baseline period of October to November 2019 and then plummeted in February 2020. CASS were, ironically, not predicted by COVID-19's incidence and mortality rates, but rather by Hofstede's cultural dimensions: individualism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance-as shown by mixed models (N=28,494). Specifically, higher power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance were associated with negative societal sentiments toward Asians. CONCLUSIONS: Racism, in the form of Anti-Asian sentiments, are deep-seated, and predicated on structural undercurrents of culture. The COVID-19 pandemic may have indirectly and inadvertently exacerbated societal tendencies for racism. Our study lays the important groundwork to design interventions and policy communications to ameliorate Anti-Asian racism, which are culturally nuanced and contextually appropriate.

Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity.

The current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media; in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is one of the first known studies to operationalize news media diversity and examine its association with cultural values during the pandemic. We tracked the global diversity of COVID-19 coverage in a news media database of 12 billion words, collated from 28 million articles over 7000 news websites, across 8 months. Media diversity was measured weekly by the number of unique descriptors of 10 target terms of the pandemic (e.g., COVID-19, coronavirus) and normalized by the corpus size for the respective countries per week. Government Stringency was taken from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and cultural scores were taken from Hofstede's Cultural Values global database. Results showed that Media Diversity Rate increased 6.7 times over 8 months, from the baseline period (October-December 2019) to during the pandemic (January-May 2020). Mixed effects modelling revealed that higher COVID-19 prevalence rates and governmental stringency predicted this increase. Interestingly, collectivist cultures are linked to more diverse media coverage during COVID-19. It is possible that news outlets in collectivist societies are motivated to present a diverse array of topics given the impact of COVID-19 on every segment of society. Of broader significance, we provided a framework to design targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced.

Reframing aging during COVID-19: Familial role-based framing of older adults linked to decreased ageism.

BACKGROUND: Contributions of older adults amid the COVID-19 pandemic have been eclipsed by discourse positioning them as an at-risk population. We assess whether age-based framing (e.g., senior citizen) is associated with more negative stereotyping in the media compared to familial role-based framing (e.g., grandparent) across 8 months, from a baseline period (October 2019-December 2019) to the onset of the pandemic (January 2020-May 2020). METHODS: Leveraging a 12-billion-word news media database-with over 30 million news articles from over 7000 websites-we identified the most common synonyms for age-based framing (e.g., senior citizen) and familial role-based framing (e.g., grandparent). For each framing category, we compiled the most frequently used descriptors every month, amassing 488,907 descriptors in total. All descriptors were rated from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive) to determine a Cumulative Aging Narrative Score (CANS) for age-based and familial role-based framing. RESULTS: Age-based framing of older adults increased negative stereotyping in the media by seven times compared to familial role-based framing during COVID-19. The percentage of positive topics for age-based framing was significantly lower during COVID-19 (35%) than before (61%). Conversely, the percentage of positive topics for familial role-based framing was higher during the pandemic (91%) than before (70%). CONCLUSION: This is one of the first empirical studies on whether framing older adults based on age or role is linked to more negative stereotypes during COVID-19. We argue for a more role-centered approach in framing older adults so that their contributions are acknowledged and valued by society.

Societal Age Stereotypes in the U.S. and U.K. from a Media Database of 1.1 Billion Words.

Recently, 194 World Health Organization member states called on the international organization to develop a global campaign to combat ageism, citing its alarming ubiquity, insidious threat to health, and prevalence in the media. Existing media studies of age stereotypes have mostly been single-sourced. This study harnesses a 1.1-billion-word media database comprising the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English-with genres including spoken/television, fiction, magazines, newspapers-to provide a comprehensive view of ageism in the United Kingdom and United States. The US and UK were chosen as they are home to the largest media conglomerates with tremendous power to shape public opinion. The most commonly used synonym of older adults was identified, and its most frequently used descriptors were analyzed for valence. Such computational linguistics techniques represent a new advance in studying aging narratives. The key finding is consistent, though no less alarming: Negative descriptions of older adults outnumber positive ones by six times. Negative descriptions tend to be physical, while positive ones tend to be behavioral. Magazines contain the highest levels of ageism, followed by the spoken genre, newspapers, and fiction. Findings underscore the need to increase public awareness of ageism and lay the groundwork to design targeted societal campaigns to tackle ageism-one of our generation's most pernicious threats.

Culture Linked to Increasing Ageism During COVID-19: Evidence From a 10-Billion-Word Corpus Across 20 Countries.

OBJECTIVES: Older adults experience higher risks of getting severely ill from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), resulting in widespread narratives of frailty and vulnerability. We test: (a) whether global aging narratives have become more negative from before to during the pandemic (October 2019 to May 2020) across 20 countries; (b) model pandemic (incidence and mortality), and cultural factors associated with the trajectory of aging narratives. METHODS: We leveraged a 10-billion-word online-media corpus, consisting of 28 million newspaper and magazine articles across 20 countries, to identify nine common synonyms of "older adults" and compiled their most frequently used descriptors (collocates) from October 2019 to May 2020-culminating in 11,504 collocates that were rated to create a Cumulative Aging Narrative Score per month. Widely used cultural dimension scores were taken from Hofstede, and pandemic variables, from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. RESULTS: Aging narratives became more negative as the pandemic worsened across 20 countries. Globally, scores were trending neutral from October 2019 to February 2020, and plummeted in March 2020, reflecting COVID-19's severity. Prepandemic (October 2019), the United Kingdom evidenced the most negative aging narratives; peak pandemic (May 2020), South Africa took on the dubious honor. Across the 8-month period, the Philippines experienced the steepest trend toward negativity in aging narratives. Ageism, during the pandemic, was, ironically, not predicted by COVID-19's incidence and mortality rates, but by cultural variables: Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long-term Orientation. DISCUSSION: The strategy to reverse this trajectory lay in the same phenomenon that promoted it: a sustained global campaign-though, it should be culturally nuanced and customized to a country's context.