engleski

Digital News Media as A Social resilience Proxy: A Computational Political Economy Perspective

In this paper, we argue that the digital news media may serve as a proxy for social resilience in terms of uncovering meanings and themes that framed the perception of the pandemic in the public sphere. The public sphere approach has been evaluated and reconsidered ad nauseam in the last thirty years. A long list of factors limiting the deliberative, communicative action ideal of the public sphere includes fragmentation, media concentration, marketization, commercialization, digital intermediaries, echo chambers, post-democracy, and fake democracy to name a few. Yet the COVID-19 emergency has painfully exposed the need for just such a rational communication space in which citizens could find relevant information with rational discussion on how to cope, adapt and overcome a global health crisis. When physical mobility was limited, the media served as a focal point providing unprecedented coverage of political, economic, and social conditions affected by the uncontrollable spread of the virus. The media also provided citizens with a range of potential behavioral orientations in line with ongoing scientific research. We observe the digital news media from a systemic and political economy perspective, which allows us to interpret their societal role in fostering (or limiting) social resilience, managing, and potentially overcoming the crisis. To understand the role of the digital news media for social resilience, we deployed computational techniques that allowed us to decipher broad tendencies and shifts in news media reports over the course of four major waves of the pandemic (in terms of daily infection rates) between January 2020 and December 2021. We selected a total of 21 news portals in Croatia based on audience reach, regional coverage, and ownership (public, private, non-profit). We used computational techniques of natural language processing and machine learning to analyze and compare all news reports related to the pandemic and published during the analyzed period (N = 147 050).

Digital news, political economy, platform economy, public sphere, social resilience, COVID-19, computational methods, natural language processing

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