Abstract
From the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that the practices of naming the disease, its nature and its handling by the health authorities, the news media and the politicians had social and ideological implications. This article presents a sociosemiotic study of such practices as reflected in a corpus of headlines of eight newspapers of four countries in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. After an analysis of the institutional naming choices of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, the study focuses on the changes in newspapers’ naming patterns following the WHO’s announcement of the disease name on 11 February 2020. A subsequent political controversy related to naming in the United States is then examined in reports of The New York Times and The Washington Post as a further illustration of how public discourses and perceptions can rapidly evolve in the context of health crises.
Highlights
The evolving labeling choices in the news headlines of the eight newspapers examined during the first stages of the COVID-19 outbreak show that naming is a socially situated behavior, and that this social construction of meaning is dynamic in the context of new social phenomena
While the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) followed its evidence-based naming policy for establishing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2)’ as the name of the new virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) attempted to make the disease name ‘emotionally neutral and objectively descriptive’ (Hough, 2016: 11) by avoiding the use of terms related to geographical locations and the term ‘SARS’
After the WHO announced the new name ‘COVID-19’ on 11 February 2020, stigmatizing and alarming virus denominations previously found in leading mainstream newspapers of various ideological orientations almost disappeared from the same news outlets
Summary
Keywords Coronavirus, COVID-19, headline, institutional discourse, naming, news media, politics, sociosemiotics, World Health Organization With the increasingly serious and wide spread of the virus, the names of the disease, which are construed in distinct ways by different name-givers, including the public authorities and the news media, became a key element of communication about the health crisis.
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