The article provides one of the first analyses of textual-visual news posted by two leading German newspapers on Twitter. The authors conducted a content analysis of 2479 tweets during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. The results identified nine news frames among which politics and instructions, update information, economic impact and social impact presented more thematic salience. An alluvial diagram revealed the connections between textual frames and visual signs across three crisis phases. The study demonstrates the value of integrating texts and visuals into framing analysis to better understand the multimodal news presentation of health crises.
The research was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under the project “Deciphering the ‘pandemic public sphere’: Government communication, (social) media discourses on and citizens’ responses to COVID-19 in Europe and the USA”.
Link to article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2022.2058063