Abstract
Apart from changes in lifestyle, Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) alters people's values or way of thinking partly because people spend more time browsing the Internet during quarantine. Trendy topics are always related to COVID-19, such as newly updated morality and fatality rate, measures of avoiding COVID-19, and the impact of the pandemic on the global economics and political scene. Different news editors tend to emphasize different detail of the same piece of information, thus switching audiences' attention, leading to diversity of thinking on the same information. By applying the agenda-setting theory as a theoretical model and case analysis as methodology, the paper further explores how media handle COVID-19-related news to shape public opinion in the context of Western public opinion. Ultimately, this study found that news coverage in the Western mainstream media exhibits the following characteristics: control of the direction of news coverage, guidance of public opinion but susceptibility to public opinion, homogeneity of content and the ability to enhance mass cohesion.
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