The Analysis of the COVID-19 Image Evolution in English Mass Media Discourse

Abstract

Starting from January 2020, the whole world and all the people’s professional activities are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the phenomenon of COVID has been analyzed from different perspectives. The present study aims to study the evolution of the COVID-19 image in the online mass media discourse on the example of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news portal. The research employs semantic network analysis to trace the changes in the description of the coronavirus-related articles presented online. Three samples of articles from the period from 2020 to 2022 are randomly collected and subjected to further analysis. As a result, the author concludes, that the image of the COVID pandemic has undergone a significant change from the distant public health-related phenomenon to one of the legal actors and social activities. The present study contributes to the analysis of the coronavirus pandemic domain in the online mass media discourse and diversifies the studies, employing the semantic network analysis approach.

Keywords

• covid-19
• semantic network analysis
• mass media discourse
• vosviewer software
• discourse evolution