Coverage of COVID-19 Lockdown Protests in The Sun and The Guardian: A Comparative Analysis.
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2021-07-14
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en
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The present study aims to discover how the COVID-19 anti-lockdown demonstrations were
framed in both The Sun and The Guardian. How frames are used to report a story is important to
understand since frames provide different narratives to the same story and, therefore, the readers
of the respective frames receive a partial or incomplete version of the story. Because the
COVID-19 virus and the lockdown protests are relatively new and rare occurrences, studying
how these events have been framed in different media channels becomes increasingly important
to understand due to the potential social implications it can have. 20 English news feature articles
were extracted, 10 from The Sun and 10 from The Guardian. For this study, qualitative discourse
analysis was conducted over two phases. Phase one consisted of a textual analysis that used
inductive framing analysis to identify the most prominent frame(s) in the news features. Phase
two consisted of contextual analysis. The results showed that the main core frames found in The
Sun were ‘Irresponsible behavior of protesters that want freedom’, ‘Conspiracy theories led to
protesting’, ‘Many protesters were arrested’, and ‘Violent actions’. The main core frames found
in The Guardian were ‘Conspiracy theories led to protesting’, ‘Many protesters were arrested’,
‘Sympathy for the protesters’, ‘Violent actions’, and ‘Abuse of power’. However, the papers
differed in ‘solution responsibility’ as well as quotation use. The proposed differences between
The Sun and The Guardian could be due to the ideological and quality differences of the
newspapers, hence attributing responsibility to different agents and reporting information
differently. (Keywords: COVID-19, News framing, qualitative discourse analysis, inductive
framing analysis, comparative analysis)
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