Question

why has COVID-19 pandemic become a highly polarized topic? what are the arguments people make that public health initiatives are impacting individual liberty?

can you also see the economic impact that has been made through some of the public health initiatives?

Answer 1

This study examines the level of politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news in U.S. newspapers and televised network news from March to May 2020. Using multiple computer-assisted content analytic approaches, we find that newspaper coverage is highly politicized, network news coverage somewhat less so, and both newspaper and network news coverage are highly polarized. We find that politicians appear in newspaper coverage more frequently than scientists, whereas politicians and scientists are more equally featured in network news. The high degree of politicization and polarization in initial COVID-19 coverage may have contributed to polarization in U.S. COVID-19 attitudes.In late 2019, a novel coronavirus, COVID-19, began to spread throughout the world. COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization on January 30 and a pandemic on March 11, 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020). The infection rate and death toll have been substantial; by the end of May 2020, at least 6 million people had been infected and at least 369,000 had died globally. Many of the infections have been concentrated in the United States, with at least 1.8 million individuals infected and 100,000 individuals killed by COVID-19 in the United States by the end of May .While COVID-19 poses a significant risk, political responses and public perceptions in the United States have been divided across political ideological lines.This raises questions about the role that both politicians and the media have played in amplifying politicization and polarization of COVID-19, as this kind of news coverage can influence public attitudes in ways that exacerbate partisan divides.Examining the first months of COVID-19 news coverage may therefore help us to better understand what informed the public’s initial perceptions of COVID-19. Though research to date has not examined politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news coverage, recent research.investigating politicization (the degree that politicians are mentioned in conjunction with the issue) and polarization (how discussion varies based on the presence of actors from different political parties) in climate change news coverage offers a useful methodological approach for analyzing these features in news content. We draw on this approach in the present study, which uses both dictionary and unsupervised machine learning methods to investigate the degree to which newspaper and network news coverage of COVID-19 was polarized and politicized during the first 3 months of heightened news coverage