Framing COVID-19 at the early stage: a corpus-based discourse study of the Chinese English-language press

The news media play an important role in effectively communicating public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic in that the framing of news stories can greatly influence public attitudes, behaviors, and their response to such crises. Underpinned by a deductive corpus-based analysis of frames, this study combines quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate COVID-19 news framing by China Daily in the initial 3 months. It demonstrates the integration of keywords and collocations to examine how China Daily frames COVID-19 at the early stage of the pandemic. It is achieved by drawing on the four functions of communication and categorizing the keywords into semantic sets to identify the framing patterns in a deductive way. The analysis reveals that Severity frame and Action frame are identified as the most dominant, followed by Economic frame and Blaming frame. These framing patterns shows how China Daily uses news discourse to construct a positive China’s image by prioritizing the crisis severity and action response over the economic consequences, and employing blaming discourse for self-clarification in the face of stigma. The analysis helps to demonstrate the effectiveness of corpus linguistics in exploring media framing and illuminates the specific understanding of the news environment and ideological consolidation within the context of China.