Critical Discourse Analysis on Media Coverage of COVID-19 Contract Tracing Applications: Case of South Africa

Abstract

Media has the power to influence the public's views on certain issues, ideologies, and innovations. The media affects whether people accept or adopt a practice or innovation. How certain issues are portrayed in the media affects social reality through the kind of language used and how it is presented. Therefore, it is important to assess the discourse of contact-tracing applications, given how the public must adopt them to contain the spread of the coronavirus. This paper investigates the media discourse of contact-tracing applications in South Africa. We used Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse several media articles using Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. This involved assessing four validity claims (truth, sincerity, comprehensibility, and legitimacy) to uncover systematic distortions which could affect how the public perceived the Information and Communications Technology artefacts. The analysis showed distortions that could create false impressions on the efficacy of the artefacts; these pushed the notion that would result in South Africans using them more. However, the distortions were overshadowed by the overall evidence from the claims which made a consensus that the media discourse on the application is credible.