US Nationwide Multi-City Media Coverage of COVID-19 Responses: Community Structure Theory, Belief System, and a “Violated Way of Life”

Abstract

Community structure analysis compared city characteristics and newspaper coverage of state/local government responses to COVID-19 in 25 major U.S. cities, sampling all 250+ word articles from 4/4/20 to 7/6/20. The resulting 588 articles were coded for “prominence” and “direction” (favorable/unfavorable/balanced-neutral coverage), then combined into each newspaper’s composite “Media Vector” (range=0.3552 to −0.5197, or 0.8749). Twenty-one of 25 newspapers (84%) displayed unfavorable coverage of local COVID-19 responses. Pearson correlations and regression analysis confirmed a muscular “violated way of life” pattern, when a community perceives itself as threatened by a “biological threat or a threat to a cherished way of life.” Political and belief system polarization (in particular percent Evangelical and percent voting Republican) were strongly associated with unfavorable coverage of local pandemic responses, compared to more favorable responses linked to percent voting Democratic or percent Catholic. Vulnerability (percent uninsured) was also linked to negative coverage. Conversely, two different measures of access to healthcare (percent municipal spending on health and welfare, and physicians/100,000) were significantly linked to favorable coverage of the same local government efforts. Community structure theory’s grass roots “bottom up” expectations linking community demographics to variations in reporting on critical issues were robustly confirmed.