Politicising the pandemic: a mixed-methods frame analysis of COVID-19 coverage in The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald

News coverage of public-health crises is increasingly shaped by geopolitical contestation, yet how organisational logics channel this contestation into distinct rhetorical forms remains underexamined. This study analyses how two Australian newspapers—The Daily Telegraph (DT) and The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)—framed COVID-19 during the pandemic’s “China stage” (23 January–10 April 2020), when Sino-Australian tensions and a durable “China-threat” repertoire intersected with risk reporting. Based on a mixed-methods frame analysis of 39 print items, we find that politicising frames—attribution, action/solution, and conflict—dominated primary coverage in both outlets (approximately 72%). Crucially, the two newspapers differed less in whether they politicised than in how they did so: DT personalised blame, foregrounded individual culpability, and used imperative mobilisation rhetoric, whereas SMH distributed blame across institutions, emphasised procedural and evidentiary language, and relied more heavily on expert sourcing. Interpreted through the hierarchy-of-influences framework, these patterns suggest that ownership structures and audience niches shape how politicisation is rhetorically executed more than whether it occurs. Comparatively, Australia occupies a middle position between the adversarial commercial conventions of US/UK tabloids and the more procedural styles of European public-service media. The findings suggest that effective health-risk communication should anticipate outlet-specific staging so that biomedical guidance is not crowded out by geopolitical narratives. The narrow print corpus and early-pandemic focus invite cross-platform, cross-national, and audience-reception extensions.