Politicizing the Pandemic? Partisan Framing of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic Was Infrequent, Particularly in Local Newspapers

ABSTRACT

Media scholars have long expressed concern that news outlets’ tendency to frame policy debates in terms of partisan conflict or political gamesmanship politicizes and polarizes public opinion. This tendency may be particularly problematic with new, highly salient issues like the COVID-19 pandemic during its earliest stages. To evaluate the degree to which coverage of the pandemic in its first months was framed in partisan terms we analyze the content of COVID-19 related articles published on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a random sample of local newspapers between February 21 and May 15, 2020. Contrary to what existing work about the politicization of early-pandemic news coverage might lead us to expect, we find these newspapers employed partisan framings of the pandemic in only about one out of ten articles. However, these frequencies differ dramatically across the kind of newspaper, with the two national papers far more likely to employ partisan framings than the local newspapers, and lower-circulation local papers much less likely to employ partisan framing than higher-circulation local papers. These results suggest that the degree to which news consumers receive partisan-framed messages about the pandemic depends on whether they consume local or national media. Further, the collapse of local news outlets may have led news consumers to see more partisan-framed coverage in the early stages of the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• COVID-19
• local news
• framing
• partisanship
• conflict frame
• game frame

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Benjamin Ippolito, Josie Warmka, and David Anderson for their research assistance as well as Alicia Hofelich Mohr and Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg for assistance assembling the data replication archive. Members of the University of Minnesota Media and Politics Research Group and panelists at the 2021 Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

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

Data Availability Statement

Data and code to replicate the analyses in this paper are archived in the Data Repository of the University of Minnesota and is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.13020/wsmw-jp95.

Notes

1. Notably, this data is also from before much of the decline in local news circulation and newsroom capacity.

2. Dunaway and Lawrence (2015, 2008)’s find that newspapers that are owned by corporations or large chains produce more game-framed campaign coverage. They interpret this primarily in terms of organizations’ economic incentives; alternatively, the need for journalists to produce coverage that can be reprinted in multiple newspapers may reduce the value of proximity and increase the value of conflict.

3. Wichowsky and Condon (2022, pp. 4–5) offer a similar explanation for why second experiment’s null finding.

4. In addition to these studies, Krupekin et al. (2022) use a structural topic model to identify the topics present in cable, national television, and local television news coverage of COVID. They find significant differences between the topics covered by cable news and local TV news, but do not interpret these results in terms of politicization.

5. Specifically, Sol et al. (2020) examine USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, whose weekly circulation is ranked, respectively, 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, 8^th, 9^th and 38^th among newspapers tracked by the Alliance for Audited Media. As the analysis below shows, there are stark differences in frame usage between these papers and smaller local papers.

6. The exception was the East South Central Division, which had no tier 1 paper. For this division, we counted the highest circulation tier 2 paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal as a tier 1 newspaper in further analyses.

7. Newspapers for which we could not obtain a digital reproduction were excluded from our sampling frame.

8. Articles that were coded as “partisan game” but not “partisan conflict” tended to be about the strategic implications of intra-party conflict or the strategic implications of conflict between Trump and scientific experts. Across all sources, 49% of partisan game-frame coded articles were also coded as partisan conflict frames; conversely, 13% of partisan conflict articles were also coded as containing partisan game frames.

9. This item corresponds to Aalberg et al. (2012)’s instructions for identifying a “strategic game macro frame.”

10. Despite the name, a Texas County Judge serves as the county’s chief executive officer.

11. The source of 12 Tier 3 articles could not be ascertained. Of the 126 articles from other sources, 75 were from the AP, 28 from the New York Times, 11 from the Washington Post, and 13 from other papers.

12. We limit our analysis across tiers to partisan conflict frames as we find only five game framed articles in local newspapers. Thus, we do not test H6.

13. Though see Bartholomé et al. (2015)’s argument that journalists play an active role in building these frames, even absent a supply from political actors. Future research should examine the relative roles of political actors and journalistic agency in building conflict frames.

14. Bailard (2022)’s finding that counties with a higher count of newspapers saw more polarization in social distancing suggests an alternative interpretation, that papers in more competitive markets use conflict frames more frequently, though both market competitiveness and newspaper tier are highly correlated with population.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

C. Daniel Myers

C. Daniel Myers is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. His research focuses on political stereotypes, local news media, and democratic deliberation.