Media framing of fighting COVID-19 in China

Abstract

This study focuses on media framings of COVID-19 in Chinese social and cultural contexts. After analysing nine weeks’ news reports of Xinwen Lianbo, one of China's mainstream media, we discovered that the metaphorical war frame dominated throughout the corpus but it did not remain the same. Some of its semantic concepts like the type of war evolved over time. There are also several minor metaphors such as race, challenge, chess and combination blow metaphors, which are not as dominant as the war metaphor but should by no means be neglected. The race and challenge metaphors are complementary with the war metaphor to frame COVID-19, while the chess and combination blow metaphors are culturally loaded. What's more, literal frames like responsibility and collaboration were also found in the corpus. All frames, whether metaphorical or literal, work together to shape what COVID-19 was, what roles people should play and what people could do. In this study, we intend to explore how media framings of COVID-19 were related to media and government's responses as well as how they might have contributed to the public's responses. The media is an important source of information, whose role in public health emergencies deserves our attention.