#8 - International Media

 COVID coverage around the world

   

    The pandemic has almost completely turned around the lives of virtually everyone in one way or another. While COVID-19 has given us chances to find common ground with many people and has allowed more people to rely on each other, there is a large and steady difference that has occurred between the United States and the rest of the world. Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, said he began noticing something different while watching COVID coverage on popular news networks in the U.S.. Bruce said that everything seemed so negative despite any promising data that he has heard of surrounding the pandemic. It seemed like these news channels were emphasizing the increase of COVID cases when they were rising. In addition, when these cases were falling in a majority of the country, the news was focusing on the smaller percentage of places where the cases were continuing to rise. 

    In order to test his hunch, Sacerdote joined a few of his colleagues and conducted a study comparing United States media coverage of the pandemic to that of other countries. The results of the study proved Bruce's thoughts to be true. They found that 87% of the COVID coverage in the United States last year was negative while 51% percent of international media was negative. They also saw that United States media outlets with both conservative and liberal audiences all were showing a majority of negative coverage about the pandemic. While the facts they presented may have been facts, the question comes to "Why did they emphasize the facts that they emphasized?"


    Personally, I definitely think the election played a large role in the results of this study. It seemed like everyday I was seeing negative pandemic coverage from one side in order to bring down the current President and from the other side in order to push the narrative that COVID is somehow fake or just inevitable. If this was a large factor in pushing the negative coverage, it would be easy to see why there was such a large difference between the United States and other countries. Those international news cites were not voting for a new leader for their country and therefore showed no allegiance to one side or another. I feel like a large amount of the COVID coverage in the United States ended up being used as political gain or political moves, where as reporters and journalists from other countries did not face that issue. 

    The difference between United States and international media and news can become extremely varied depending on the status of these countries. 2020 brought a large amount of issues and topics to the forefront for the United States and I believe that caused our media, specifically COVID coverage, to have such a vast difference from that of other countries around the world. It will be interesting to see, as more and more people get vaccinated and as the world tries its best to go back to normal, whether or not this difference stays the same or increases or decreases in the near future. 

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