The British press’ coverage of coronavirus threat: a comparative analysis based on corpus linguistics.

Abstract

The world is living one of the most difficult times at the moment since a pandemic has been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO, henceforth). In this scenario, information is one of the most powerful tools, not only just to inform, but also to alarm people and create panic. The aim of this paper is to make a comparative linguistic analysis of headlines from serious and sensationalist journalism in the UK. The corpus consists of a compilation of headlines published over the period of one month (from 20th January to 20th February), which have been extracted from four broadsheets: The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Telegraph; and four tabloids: The Sun, The Mirror, The Express and The Daily Mail. The corpus management tool Sketch Engine and the programming language R have been used since they allow the user to carry out both an automatic analysis of the text and basic statistics from Corpus Linguistics.