Study on characters reports of mainstream media of the COVID-19 from a semiotic perspective

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19, the mainstream media have produced multi-angle and all-round character reports. In order to study the mainstream media’s strategy of character reporting in COVID-19, and to make recommendations for the mainstream media to optimize their strategies. This study, adopting a semiotic perspective, uses content analysis to analyse the content of 186 media reports from People's Daily, Xinhua Daily and China Youth Daily during the 76 days from 23 January 2020 when Wuhan was closed to the public to 8 April 2020 when the city was unsealed. This study derived the basic composition of characters in mainstream media coverage, and also analysed the characteristics and tendencies in mainstream media character coverage based on this, and found that the mainstream media adopted a civilian perspective and a comprehensive character composition in this public health event; it showed similar characteristics in terms of reporting style, and overall showed strong coding characteristics.