When did the news stop being about the virus and start being about the economy?

The COVID-19 news cycle started with case counts, and rightly so. As the pandemic went on, the focus shifted to its effect on the economy, culture, and society. Because policy makers lean on the news to decide how to help their constituents, the timing of that shift matters. Guang Lu, Martin Businger, Christian Dollfus, Thomas Wozniak, Matthes Fleck, Timo Heroth, Irina Lock, and Janna Lipenkova measured the changing share of economic news in COVID-19 coverage with natural language processing.

Approach

The study used the open-source COVID-19 Public Media Dataset by Anacode, more than 350,000 articles from about 60 English-language blogs and news sites, collected between January and August 2020. After cleaning with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) extracted the words characteristic of economic coverage.

Each article was then assigned to predefined COVID-19 topics from the World Economic Forum (WEF), among them Media’s Role During COVID-19, Public Policy and Governance, Economic Impact, Developing and Distributing Vaccines, and Impact on Travel and Trade. The assignment used sentence embeddings from the sentence-BERT model, with the cosine similarity between article and topic giving the strength of the match. LASER embeddings from Facebook research produced similar results as a check. spaCy named entity recognition placed articles geographically and GeoPandas plotted them, while the BERT extractive summarizer condensed the text and Top2Vec found micro-topics inside the summaries.

Findings

The Health and Disease topic dominated the first weeks of the pandemic and pushed everything else into the background. Health concerns were the priority and the economic consequences were not yet visible. As cases rose, Health and Disease trended downward, but the other topics did not trend upward to match. The results also suggest that the media turns to economic impact when the growth in new cases slows, which is visible in weeks 23 to 26 of the data. The geography of the micro-topic Digital Economy and New Value Creation matched the geography of new COVID-19 cases.

What they recommend

The authors argue for monitoring news from around the world so decision makers can get ahead of the social and economic consequences of a crisis. They also suggest that the media should resist herd behavior in what it chooses to cover.

Source: Lu, G., Businger, M., Dollfus, C., Wozniak, T., Fleck, M., Heroth, T., Lock, I., and Lipenkova, J. (2023). Agenda-setting for COVID-19: A study of large-scale economic news coverage using natural language processing. International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, 15, 291 to 312. doi:10.1007/s41060-022-00364-7

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