Agendas and frames in a global pandemic: Evolution of cross-country media coverage

The originally approved project analyzes which social issues media organizations, political actors and the public - across different nations and languages ​​of the European Union - attach the highest priority in public communication spaces. Based on the theory of agenda setting, large data sets of various regional origins and languages, consisting of traditional media reports and political speeches in digitally recorded form as well as social media, are collected and analyzed. For this purpose, traditional methods for measuring public and media agendas are complemented with modern text analysis methods (multilingual news story detection, latent attribute inference, identifying probabilistic information pathways). It also examines the extent to which social media data can be used to capture a broader public agenda and complement surveys. The applicants want to use the additional module to delve deeper into media behavior in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and at the same time to synergistically bring the methodological advances that were achieved in the previous work to bear. The aim is to investigate across countries and languages ​​how reporting on the coronavirus relates to other social issues and how these topics are treated over time and across countries (also outside the European Union). An investigation of sociocultural factors for observable similarities and differences is also planned, for example based on how the content is reflected in social media.