Time-Lagged Dynamics of Risk and Prevention Communication in COVID-19 News in South Korea

This study investigates the temporal dynamics and causal relationships among risk-focused, prevention-focused, and mixed (risk and prevention) media messages during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea, from December 31, 2019 to February 2020. Although media coverage plays a pivotal role in shaping public perception and encouraging preventive behavior during health crises, there is limited empirical research on how different types of messages evolve and interact over time. The news data used in this study were collected from BigKinds, a platform operated by the Korea Press Foundation, and include articles from major national daily newspapers, economic newspapers, broadcasters, specialized media, and online news outlets, as well as transcribed texts of some TV news programs. Using a corpus of Korean news articles, we categorized each article into one of the three message types and applied a series of time series analyses including cross-correlation, Granger causality tests, vector autoregression (VAR), cointegration tests, and vector error correction modeling (VECM). The results show a sequential dynamic in which risk-focused reporting significantly precedes mixed messaging, which subsequently leads to an increase in prevention-focused articles, typically with a lag of 1 to 2 weeks. Impulse response functions from the VAR model support this cascading pattern, while VECM results confirm the presence of a long-run equilibrium and short-run adjustment mechanisms among the three categories. This study offers three key contributions. First, it theorizes mixed messaging as a transitional stage between risk and prevention frames, addressing limitations in binary message models. Second, it provides an empirical framework for analyzing time-lagged media dynamics based on actual news content. Third, it reveals that prevention messaging was delayed during the early stages of the pandemic, suggesting a need for more timely and integrated communication strategies in future public health emergencies.