Discourse analysis of news frames in Philippine banner stories on COVID-19: implications for media and information literacy during crises

Abstract

To understand newspapers’ Covid-19 portrayal in the Philippines and contribute to COVID-19 media framing literature, this study identified news frames in 97 banner stories of three Philippine broadsheets and determined how major frames depicted COVID-19 during its initial spread in the country (January 30 - March 25, 2020). Utilizing deductive and inductive approaches to generate news frames for coding, results yielded 12 frames in the three newspapers, with Action, New Evidence, Reassurance, Conflict, Economic Consequence, and Social Consequence as major frames. Generally, the newspapers’ pandemic depiction was similar in foregrounding government response and new COVID-19 information instead of news that invites fear and panic. Variations were found in the newspapers’ individual focus on the pandemic, conflicts about it, and its economic effects – nuances which reflected the newspapers’ reputation. Results identify the need for developing people’s critical media and information literacy skills. Studying COVID-19 news framing in developing these skills is recommended.

Keywords:

• News frames
• COVID-19
• media and information literacy
• discourse analysis
• banner stories
• SDG4

Acknowledgments

The authors extend their deep gratitude to the following for their professional advice on the tool and methods used for the study: Dr. Kevin Carl P. Santos and Dr. Teodora M. Salubayba of the College of Education, University of the Philippines-Diliman and the Office of Extension Services and External Linkages of the School of Statistics, University of the Philippines-Diliman through its Director, Asst. Prof. Martin Augustine B. Borlongan. The article benefited greatly from their feedback.

Notes

1 Excerpts from news articles are labeled as follows – the initials of the newspaper name (MB, PDI, or PS) and date of the article (01-12 for month, 01-31 for day, and the last two digits of the year, 20).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Romylyn A. Metila

Romylyn A. Metila is an Associate Professor at the Language Education Area of the College of Education, University of the Philippines Diliman. She is particularly interested in code-switching, translanguaging, multilingual education, and language planning and policy.

Audrey Buenavista Morallo

Audrey Buenavista Morallo is an Assistant Professor at the College of Education, University of the Philippines Diliman where he teaches applied linguistics, methods, and language acquisition courses. He obtained his MA in Education major in Language Education at the College of Education of the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2018 while he finished his Bachelor of Arts major in Journalism with high honors at the University of Santo Tomas. Some of his research interests are discourse analysis, linguistic mitigation in discourse, corpus-based language teaching, teacher training, and second language acquisition.

Nerissa O. Zara

Nerissa O. Zara is an Assistant Professor at the College of Education at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She finished AB Literature at the University of Santo Tomas and finished her M.A. Ed in Language Education at the University of the Philippines. She also finished her Graduate Certificate in Distance Education at the University of the Philippines Open University. She is a materials developer, teacher trainer, and a researcher. Applications of technology in language teaching, multimodality, multiliteracies, and alternative learning systems are some of her research interests.