The Role of the Canadian Media During the Initial Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Topic Modelling Approach Using Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News Articles

Patel, Janhavi; Desai, Harsheev; Okhowat, Ali

BACKGROUND: Beginning as a local epidemic, COVID-19 has since rapidly evolved into a pandemic. As countries around the world battle this outbreak, mass media has played an active role in disseminating public health information. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to get a better understanding of the role that the Canadian media played during the pandemic and to investigate the patterns of topics covered by media news reporting. METHODS: We used a data set consisting of news articles published on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) website between December 2019 and May 2020. We then used Python software to analyze the data using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling. Subsequently, we used the pyLDAvis tool to plot these topics on a 2D plane through multidimensional scaling and divided these topics into different themes. RESULTS: After removing articles that were published before the year 2019, we identified 6771 relevant news articles. According to the CV coherence value, we divided these articles into 15 topics, which were categorized into 6 themes. The three most popular themes were case reporting and testing (n=1738), Canadian response to the pandemic (n=1259), and changes to social life (n=1171), which accounted for 25.67%, 18.59%, and 17.29% of the total articles, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Understanding the Canadian media’s reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the Canadian pandemic response is a product of consistent government communication, as well as the public’s understanding of and adherence to protocols.