“COVID-19”. Coronavirus is spreading its tentacles to various parts of the world. Started from China, it has reached in parts of India, US, South Korea, France, Iran, Singapore, Australia, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates. World Health Organization had declared a ‘global public health emergency’, setting a plan of action to contain the disease, which originated from Wuhan, China. The first case of coronavirus was reported from China on December 31, 2019, and on January 30, the first case was reported in Kerala, a southern state of India. Setting the platform, this paper tries to understand the framing and agenda-setting of ‘coronavirus’ from a national perspective and how news is portrayed from crisis management and health risk perspective.
The study compared two national dailies in India – The Hindu, The Times of India, which are the leading English newspaper in India, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The study intends to do micro and macro-level framing analysis. The study tries to address: a) categorizing the frequency and percentage of coverage given for the crisis, b) how newspaper have framed the health crisis, c) to classify the similarities and difference in both newspapers in the framing, and d) to understand the risk communication and crisis management perspectives. The study was conducted during the outbreak of the virus – from Dec 31, 2019, to Feb 19, 2020, which was considered as the peak of the global health crisis. The study adopts framing, agenda-setting and risk communication as a framework to understand the underlying meaning of ‘informing people about risks’ and thereby lead them to modify their health behaviour to decrease risks. Further, the study looks at the health crisis from a crisis management approach – prodromal stage, crisis breakout stage and chronic stage and resolution stage to delineate the thematic and episodic salience of health crisis.
The results suggested that newspapers had framed news from the perspective of economic consequences, prevention and health education, and health risks. However, the coverage of health-related news is scare and minimal. The global crisis needs to be addressed at a larger scale.