Countdown to a Pandemic: BBC News representation of the response to COVID-19 as a global crisis approached

Abstract

Since COVID-19 peaked in Europe and in the USA in April 2020 there has been much speculation on the degree of complacency in the West, in terms of its own health system preparedness. I argue that a crucial factor was a socio- cognitive bias in which the media reported uncritically that we were well prepared. This was largely unchanged from SARS almost two decades earlier.This paper compares discourse analysis of Western media coverage of SARS in 2003-4 with the BBC’s representation of COVID-19, prior to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) declaration of a global pandemic in March 2020. It investigates the geopolitical and socio-cultural factors which may have contributed to the differences and similarities between these two periods of uncertainty. A corpus of 238 BBC online news articles that were published in the month after the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern were collated between February 22nd and March 17th 2020. A combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis identifies traces of the underlying assumptions that shaped the media’s approach. Many aspects of the BBC’s coverage of COVID-19 conform closely with the Western media’s treatment of SARS. This includes China’s alleged culpability and Western countries’ priority to protect themselves from a foreign virus. Journalists unconsciously othered the virus itself, linguistically and rhetorically, assuming it was for them and not us. Articles invariably drew on evidence that supported this narrative, albeit from reputable sources such as the WHO, and largely ignored perspectives that challenged it. This remained the case even as the epicentre of the crisis shifted from China to Continental Europe.