Conditional transparency: Differentiated news framings of COVID-19 severity in the pre-crisis stage in China.

Yipeng Xi,Aaron Ng,Anfan Chen,Md Nazirul Islam Sarker

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0252062

Yipeng Xi, Aaron Ng + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252062

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Abstract

Transparency of Chinese media coverage became an international controversy when the COVID-19 outbreak initially emerged in Wuhan, the eventual crisis epicenter in China. Unlike studies characterizing mass media in authoritarian contexts as government mouthpieces during a crisis, this study aims to disaggregate Chinese media practices to uncover differences in when, where, and how the severity of COVID-19 was reported. We examine differences in how media institutions reported the severity of the COVID-19 epidemic in China during the pre-crisis period from 1 January 2020 to 20 January 2020 in terms of both the “vertical” or hierarchical positions of media institutions in the Chinese media ecosystem and the “horizontal” positions of media institutions’ social proximity to Wuhan in terms of geographical human traffic flows. We find that the coverage of crisis severity is negatively associated with the media’s social proximity to Wuhan, but the effect varies depending on the positional prominence of a news article and situation severity. Implications of the institutions’ differentiated reporting strategies on future public health reporting in an authoritarian context are also discussed.

Highlights

The first case of COVID-19 was discovered in Wuhan in December 2019 but Chinese news media did not officially acknowledge the seriousness of transmissibility until 20 January 2020
Building upon the theory of fragmented authoritarianism, we argue that Chinese power hierarchies within the Chinese media structure and social proximity to Wuhan generally moderated the severity framing of the epidemic in public health news reporting during the pre-crisis stage of the COVID-19 epidemic, but the level of moderation depends on the article’s placement prominence and the seriousness of evolving situations
We employed generalized linear model (GLM) with binomial errors to explore the impact of the level of media institutions (H1) and social proximity (H2) on the weight of a health severity frame in a news article

Summary

Introduction

The first case of COVID-19 was discovered in Wuhan in December 2019 but Chinese news media did not officially acknowledge the seriousness of transmissibility until 20 January 2020. Health information disclosure by Chinese media in the initial stage of the COVID19 outbreak in China became an international point of contention [1]. The balance between information disclosure or control is often a dilemma for crisis managers, resulting in the sense of paralysis because a choice must be made between diametrically opposed options, each having considerable pros and cons [2]. Such longstanding tensions between control and free flow of information are inherent in China’s authoritarian style of governance.

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