Abstract
Our paper tackles the development of media reporting during the COVID-19
pandemic, focusing on the January - November 2020 time span, in France,
Germany, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. We aim to
make media reporting transparent on two dimensions: the coverage of
COVID-19-related topics and the negativity of the COVID-19 media
reporting. To achieve this goal, we analysed a large news dataset with
841,415 pieces of news—including 202,608 COVID-19 media reports—on
an LSTM neural network. The news sentiment data and the corresponding
coverage are set in relation to the WHO data on COVID-19 and to Google
Trends. This compares the reality, that is WHO data, the perceived and
reported reality, that is news data, and the actions based on the
perceived and the actual reality, that is Google Trends. The results
show that media reporting on COVID-19 is unprecedented in terms of
coverage and negativity. Furthermore, the study quantifies how far media
reporting detached from the facts after the first wave of COVID-19 and
how an Infodemic spread across Europe.