Race-making of the COVID-19 outbreak in early mainstream frames: the production of the epidemic(ed) transnational citizen

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I use discourse tracing to analyse critical movements and shifts in media discourse during the early phases of the COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore. The study follows mainstream media discourses featured in The Straits Times to unearth the tensions, ruptures, and dialectics as the public health crisis developed. Specifically, I traced how media frames were constructed and reconstructed to convey escalating threats. In shaping the production of knowledge about the outbreak, journalistic rituals embedded socio-cultural factors in shapingthe outbreak narrative. In the process, racialized threats of the mobile transnational citizen were discussed, informing us how the virus is manufactured, discussed, and circulated by the media.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse tracing
• COVID-19
• outbreak narrative
• epidemic(ed) citizen
• racialization
• pandemic reporting

Introduction

What were the evolving tensions, ruptures, and dialectics in the reporting of the COVID-19 public health crisis in Singapore’s mainstream press? Analyzing news articles at the start of the outbreak produced by The Straits Times¹ (n = 838), I trace how the Singaporean media position mobile transnational citizens as racialized threats in the early reporting of the outbreak.

A global city, Singapore is situated as an ‘international circuit of capital’ (Ho, 2006, p. 386), attracting a host of transnational people, knowledge, and talent with the vision of becoming the cosmopolis of the world. The setting up of a cosmopolitan identity is aimed at attracting high powered transnational citizens from around the globe (Ho & Foo, 2020). Singapore’s ethnic makeup of its citizens includes a majority ethnic Chinese population (74.3%) that mostly migrated in the early nineteenth century (Koh, 2010), followed by a Malay population that remains indigenous to the region. Finally, a minority Indian population began immigrating in the 1800s (Rai, 2014). In the 2000s, with more liberal policies on immigration, many migrants arrived from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, liberal immigration policies led to a rise in foreigner-local tensions (Chong, 2020). Specifically, Chinese Singaporeans see themselves as sharing different cultural traits from recent PRC migrants (Ho & Foo, 2020).

The reporting of virus outbreaks are framed socioculturally, politically, economically, and ecologically, dramatizing, fictionalizing, and sometimes exaggerating claims of its destruction of humanity (Wald, 2008). At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, global media reports targeted Chinese citizens as virus spreaders (Croucher et al., 2020), contextualizing the virus emergence from the point of view of ground zero (Wald, 2008). These have implications for the early reporting of the COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore, requiring an inquiry into the media’s story-telling practices about the virus. Specifically, the racialization of the virus in the mainstream press. We see Chinese citizens discussed in homogenizing ways as primary subjects, responsible for the outbreak,

SARS was a painful chapter. It, too, emerged from China and was brought here by just one person who had been to Hong Kong. It brought two months of fear in its wake, infected 238 people, including medical staff who attended to early victims. Sars killed 33 people here. (Khalik, 2020, para 3)

The mediatization of the virus included an unassembled map of evolving information. Therefore, the media communicated the virus by highlighting its origin, centering this key frame in the initial narrative by media reports. Media reports use the term ‘Wuhan Virus’ from 5 January 2020 right up till 3 February 2020. In a later report, on the same day, the virus’s labeling shifted, where it was then reported as the Coronavirus infection.

The story-telling of a ‘virus native’ by the media during a pandemic is the very shaping of mediating practices to sense-make for audiences frames about the outbreak. The included the attribution of responsibility, shaped for readers to consume when unpacking the outbreak. This case included racializing specific subjects in formulating the outbreak narrative (Wald, 2008). In doing so, the press implicitly conveyed discourses of exclusion. In the next section, I discuss the reporting of these exclusions.

Discourses of exclusion

While Chinese nationals were viewed as traveling subjects, valuable for the Singaporean and global economy, they were also framed as risky global travelers by the press (Tay & Heng, 2020). The circulation of such tropes by the media appeared at multiple levels of discourse; micro (interpersonal), meso (local policy), and macro (borders and bans of citizens). The shutting down and shutting out of specific peoples, places, and spaces were communicated. Embedded in these narratives are tropes of exclusion of citizens within a caution and prevention frame. Amid these reports, the mainstream press circulated news suggesting that Singaporeans were exempted from the biopolitics of exclusion in early reporting, ‘Wuhan virus: No need to kill your travel bug despite coronavirus outbreak, with the right precautions’ (Menon, 2020). This particular article suggested that Singaporeans could continue to travel as long as precautions were taken, exempted from the exclusions placed on other travellers. These reports emerged within similar time frames of each other.

The neoliberal production and interpretation of borders cannot be ignored in how mainstream reports discuss the role of Chinese citizens/tourists and Singapore’s economy. Chinese workers, migrants, tourists, and students were bodies for surveillance and biopolitical exclusion. Biopolitics refers to the role of political influence on the biological dimensions of human life (Foucault2004). When the outbreak was narrativized through mainstream discourse, borders were assembled as biopolitical sites for exclusion. Early mainstream reports manufactured explicit and implicit practices of othering and exclusion during the outbreak. We must also pay attention to how pandemics reveal the construction ofcitizenship. Borders and what they mean for citizens and non-citizens are amplified in moral, social, and political articulations of health security during a pandemic (Briggs, 2005). Saving citizens through evacuations, border control, and patrol are very much part of the nation-building theatrics of contemporary global emergencies (Briggs, 2005). Thus, border crossings and movements are fundamentally a product of the neoliberal state, serving a commoditized function. In a pandemic, the image of the profit-generating tourist/immigrant shifts to the image of threatening subjects in need of containment. Local and national spaces, center in the pandemic narrative (Smith & Lee, 2017) and borders interpreted as commoditized imaginations become (un)commodifiable during outbreaks, thus shining light on how tbiopolitics and biosecurity convey exclusions. Discourses implicitly convey the neoliberal logics behind exclusions where biosecurity threats are used as reasons to close borders to specific groups of people. The border is (un)commodied, marking out groups of people for exclusion during a pandemic as a biosecurity response. In these media tropes on border exclusions, the racialization of specific people are communicated during the outbreaks.

Racializing the virus

The nomenclature of how the virus came to be defined and then re-circulated by the mainstream media as the ‘Wuhan Virus’ becomes a starting point for how frames produce knowledge about outbreaks. The information map of the virus builds over critical ruptures in mainstream reporting. A salient aspect of early reporting centered on evoking race and citizenship, with Chinese citizens reported as central perpetrators and victims of the virus,

ICA has stopped issuing visas to those with PRC passports issued in Hubei. Passengers denied entry into Singapore and stuck at Changi Airport as a result of the latest travel measures, and show no symptoms of illness, will be treated in the same way as travellers who are refused entry into the country for other reasons, such as visa-related issues. (Goh, 2020, para 6)

While a bulk of media frames focused on reporting the growing xenophobic and racist rhetoric by local Singaporeans concerning the pandemic, highlighted here, ‘employment agents and employers are starting to see cases of landlords like Mr Chua, who are closing the door on tenants returning from China’ (Sin, 2020), other frames produced by the media were oppositional. For example, media frames blamed Chinese practices of eating as part of the outbreak narrative (Wald, 2008),

Apart from the trading of animals, the market is also an abattoir, where cats and dogs are skinned and boiled, or roasted with strong open flares. At a stall selling porcupines, piles of bloody quill could be seen on the ground. In the handling, slaughter and cooking of these animals, stallholders and workers are constantly exposed to their blood, bodily fluids and excrement, all of which can be laden with pathogens that can jump from animal to human. (Tan, 2020, para 11)

The production of the epidemic(ed) citizen as a racialized threat emerges as a key theme in early mainstream reports for the spread of COVID-19 infection. Despite mainstream reports cautioning against xenophobia, media tropes assembled the image of virus spreaders. The assembling of race and culture were amassed in outbreak frames. The use of the term ‘Chinese Virus’ was found in a mainstream headline (The Straits Times, 2020). This specific article originated from Agence France Press (AFP) and was re-circulated in mainstream news. Mainstream frames assembled the concept of the epidemic(ed) citizen, where a virus native is conjured up as a central actor multiple times. For example, we see the news reintroducing SARS, ‘the SARS epidemic originated in China, infected more than 1,700 people in Hong Kong and killed nearly 300. More than 800 people, including 33 in Singapore, died from SARS in 2002 and 2003’ (Huang, 2020). Media narratives arrange the blame frame about specific citizens and their way of life in stigmatizing ways based on old and new reporting of epidemics. In this definition, the virus native is framed as carriers of viruses from multiple instances of a virus outbreak within a single state. These citizens re-emerge into hypervisibility by the media during infectious disease outbreaks. Narratives constantly re-circulate to tell us that there are actors of blame in every pandemic, organizing socio-cultural traits of a virus instead of scientific ones. For instance,

Memories of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic came flooding back after news spread last month of a mysterious pneumonia sweeping across Wuhan, in central China. (Law, 2020, para 3)

The stigmatization of the epidemic(ed) citizen today as a mobile threat needs to be critically interrogated in how the media exercises such narratives during public health reporting. The oppositional frames included reporting the virus as both ‘mysterious,’ while also blaming a cultural way of life as to why particular states were host to such recurring pandemics. On the one hand, a report suggested, ‘The WHO said on Sunday that the Wuhan outbreak appears to be linked to a single seafood market in Wuhan has not spread beyond there so far’ (The Straits Times, 2020). On the other hand, articles also implicitly and explicitly centralized eating habits as the cause of the infection,

Wuhan residents’ love of exotic meats is one possible reason for the new virus outbreak: the wholesale market where the virus was first discovered was found to have sold a variety of live animals meant for the dinner table, such as crocodile, hedgehog and deer. (Liang, 2020, para 11)

In another quote,

Such markets exist in China because they are an indelible part of the country’s food culture. As the quip goes, the Chinese eat anything with four legs, except tables, and anything with wings, except aeroplanes. (Tan, 2020)

In these excerpts, we begin to see the homogenization of the virus native, even though the reports convey that there was one market in which the outbreak had potentially occured. Chinese citizens were discussed as the virus native, singularly blamed for their eating cultures by the press. Eating cultures are embedded in how racialization of the virus is conveyed. Associating specific eating practices to specific people conveys how racializing discourses are assembled. In the next section, a discussion on the unpacking of food and eating practices in the manufacture of racializing discourses, specifically during the outbreak narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Racializing food culture

The mediatization of what is viewed as unnatural eating cultures have global ramifications for Chinese people, who have been stigmatized during previous pandemics (Lynteris, 2016). Specifically, the consumption of bats remains central to frame building about the COVID-19 outbreak. These frames were even curated by reporting specific cultural actors and their way of life to build a transference of an ethnocentric narrative in mainstream reports on consuming the specific animal of blame,

Paniki (bat stew or curry), is well-loved among the Manadonese. It is often served at special occasions such as house parties or church events. 'Bat meat indeed tastes delicious. The cooking method and the spices used are no different than other dishes, only we add coconut milk and turmeric to it,’ said Mr Helpy Poluakan, a paniki enthusiast. Ms Nicolina Pelealu, a restauranteur, took bat off the menu at all of her restaurants in Manado after learning that the animal carried the coronavirus. (Straits Times, 2020, para 6)

Here the mainstream press attributes particular cultural features to the virus (Briggs, 2003). It informs us that news reporting tells readers how to think about the virus from the point of cultural habits, features, and its impact on the body. Therefore, critically evaluating the role of the media in its development of socio-cultural features in shaping public health messaging.

Broader implications

I conclude that news reporting is further complexified during the COVID-19 pandemic where developing information is pieced for readers at an accelerated rate. The biopolitical configurations of transnational borders and migrants are organized as threatening cultural subjects by the media, shaping exclusionary discourses as part of the outbreak narrative. As Devakumar et al. (2020) cautioned, health systems cannot be separated from societal issues of inclusion and exclusion, prejudice, and discrimination. Similarly, Croucher et al. (2020) argue that societies are socially and culturally responsive to virus outbreaks. This study, too, identifies the racialized imaginaries of the virus native centralized in the etiological news frames about the virus, unpacking how Chinese citizens appear in the media’s building of the outbreak narrative as risky global travelers. Mainstream reports codify caution and prevention frames that assemble for the audience whom to fear. In the case of the COVID-19 outbreak, the reification of the Chinese citizen as the epidemic(ed) citizens of fear, failing to unpack the nation, state, race, culture, and place. Furthermore, the racializing of the virus native was especially salient during the COVID-19 pandemic reporting. The uncertainty in a globalized, interconnected world manufactures othering practices of transnational citizens.

Raimondo’s (2003) study remind us of the discriminatory representation of AIDS by the media where the organizing frames attributed sexuality, geography, and race to the epidemic. Therefore, the delivery of health communication messages about the early reporting of infectious diseases by the media must consider staying away from producing and circulating a racialized depiction of the virus native. Sastry and Dutta’s (2017) study of media frames during the Ebola outbreak informs us that media framing impacts the social performance of such infectious diseases that have societal ramifications for how outbreaks are managed.

As far as practical implications are concerned, journalists must pay attention to the shaping of early frames that impact the outbreak narrative in pandemic reporting. Early frames have socio-cultural ramifications as the outbreak progresses. How journalists discuss evolving infections and assign subjective socio-cultural meanings, associations, and stigmas have implications that follow during a pandemic (Sastry & Dutta, 2010). Even though outbreaks may often remain ambiguous health threats, journalists should refrain from pandering to homogenizing story-telling practices that ‘other’ cultural practices (Eichelberger, 2007).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Straits Times is a leading mainstream print news media in Singapore. It is an English language newspaper with a print and digital circulation of 370,700 (Singapore Press Holdings, 2020).