Pandemic narratives: news and seminality on Twitter and Facebook

ABSTRACT

The beginnings of pandemic motivated a growing interest in the Chilean users in media, especially in digital social networks, searching for useful information in order to face fear and anguish. Considering the relevance of digital social media in this country, as the main source of news, it is important to know the narratives that the journalists displayed in their stories about the social environment during the first period of the COVID-19 sanitary emergency. Thus, this study aimed to analyze and compare the discur-sive strategies that 17 Chilean media utilized to report the pandemic, and its association with seminality, namely, the ability to incite discursive interactions on users. Using a quantitative methodology, a discur-sive analysis was applied to characterize the narratives of all posts published in March and April 2020, with a sample of 6.525 news. In addition, a frequency analysis was performed to calculate the news fronts or topics and the non-textual digital resources used in the news discourses. The results suggest a narrative uniformity on the two platforms, that ignores the disparity of audiences and uses between them. This becomes evident when reviewing the association with seminality, where the more frequent linguistic marks, topics and digital resources of the news were precisely the less seminal ones.