Framing of Covid-19 Pandemic News in Malaysian Local Newspapers

Abstract

As a reliable means for the public, mass media is a critical medium to be used to disseminate information predominantly in crisis. At the end of 2019, the world faced a new pandemic, later known as the COVID-19 pandemic, after scientists identified the virus that caused this infection. The media coverage of this cause accelerated and became more expansive after the spread of a group of shocking pictures of infected cases who died on the roads and streets due to this disease. People have turned to the mass media to find out what was happening, and at the same time, media outlets interacted differently with this pandemic. In particular, this study seeks to reveal the news framing used by the most popular local newspapers in Malaysia. This study, therefore, examines the five mainframes developed by Semetko & Valkenburg: conflict, attribution of responsibility, human interest, economics, and morality. This sampling involves the News Straits Times and The Star from April 1 to April 10, 2022. This study concludes that both newspapers NST and The Star reported the Covid-19 pandemic with all the five generic frames in this order (attribution of responsibility, human interest, economic frame, morality frame, and conflict frame), where the attribution of responsibility frame is the most used frame, and the conflict frame is the least used in both media outlets, the second significant result in this study concludes that NST used these generic frames more than The Star newspaper.