2019-20 coronavirus outbreak

Ophthalmology

Virology

Economics

Development economics

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Outbreak

Business

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Political science

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Internal medicine

Political economy

Sociology

Media coverage

Globe

Medicine

Economic growth

Pandemic

Disease

Media studies

Pathology

The Lancet Planetary Health

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread rapidly across the globe,1Dong E Du H Gardner L An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; 20: 533-534Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (6092) Google Scholar and yet media coverage of the pandemic has decreased since the initial flurry of attention received during the beginning of the crisis in early 2020. Despite this decrease, public attention to the COVID-19 pandemic remains high, relative to the public's attention to other issues, and appears to have largely been supplanted and displaced rather than combined and connected with the attention paid to climate change and other societal challenges. Connections between COVID-19 and climate change, among many intersectional challenges, are varied and complex,2Forster PM Forster HI Evans MJ et al.Erratum: Publisher Correction: Current and future global climate impacts resulting from COVID-19.Nat Clim Chang. 2020; 10: 1-7Google Scholar and merit further attention in the public sphere. The media represent an important bridge between science and society because residents turn to mass media to inform and shape their attitudes, perspectives, and behaviours. The media functions as an important interpreter, from the formal spaces of science to the informal spaces of everyday life.3Boykoff MT Who speaks for the climate? Making sense of media reporting on climate change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge2011Crossref Scopus (470) Google Scholar Media stories about the pandemic have been found to have substantial effects on peoples' beliefs about its origins, opinions about appropriate policy responses, and overall politicisation of the crisis.4Hart PS Chinn S Soroka S Politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news coverage.Sci Commun. 2020; 42: 679-697Crossref Scopus (327) Google Scholar, 5Bolsen T Palm R Kingsland JT Framing the origins of COVID-19.Sci Commun. 2020; 42: 562-585Crossref Scopus (61) Google Scholar We found that the proportion of media coverage that mentioned COVID-19 (with terms such as COVID or coronavirus) in early 2020 increased dramatically within 102 high-circulation newspaper sources across 50 countries around the world. This topic emerged as a dominant media storyline just as media coverage of climate change dropped precipitously over the same period across the same sources.6Boykoff M Aoyagi M Ballantyne AG et al.World newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming, 2004–2020.https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/datasets/ng451j54hDate: August, 2020Date accessed: December 2, 2020Google Scholar This COVID-19 media tracking was carried out in 11 languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Russian, German, and Portuguese) in seven regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, North America, and Oceania). We also monitored these same sources for coverage of climate change at the Media and Climate Change Observatory, University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA.6Boykoff M Aoyagi M Ballantyne AG et al.World newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming, 2004–2020.https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/datasets/ng451j54hDate: August, 2020Date accessed: December 2, 2020Google Scholar Media coverage of COVID-19 rose precipitously during February and March, 2020, in conjunction with the first major spike in COVID-19 cases (figure). However, media coverage has steadily waned since the last week of March, despite the continued rapid and global spread of COVID-19 over the months that followed. Along with media coverage, the figure depicts the average new confirmed positive cases by week (not cumulative cases) across the 50 countries included in the media.1Dong E Du H Gardner L An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; 20: 533-534Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (6092) Google Scholar COVID-19 cases in these 50 countries constitute approximately 85% of total global COVID-19 cases.1Dong E Du H Gardner L An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; 20: 533-534Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (6092) Google Scholar There are several possible explanations for the divergence between media coverage and pandemic trends, as represented by the ratio of average new cases to media articles per week, including so-called COVID fatigue, an increasingly common term used in public discourse referring to a sense of exhaustion from continually hearing and worrying about the pandemic; other issues displacing the prominence of COVID-19 coverage in a finite news hole (eg, discussions of systemic racism and the USA elections); or general cycles of crisis communication (in which a plethora of new information is discovered and disseminated at first, proceeded by time periods of comparatively less new information to share and other priorities for public attention arise). We found that the quantity of COVID-19 media coverage is decreasing. Meanwhile, perhaps in support of the second explanation, climate change coverage has begun to increase again during the last half of 2020.6Boykoff M Aoyagi M Ballantyne AG et al.World newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming, 2004–2020.https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/datasets/ng451j54hDate: August, 2020Date accessed: December 2, 2020Google Scholar These global-level findings are consistent with country-level studies to date.4Hart PS Chinn S Soroka S Politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news coverage.Sci Commun. 2020; 42: 679-697Crossref Scopus (327) Google Scholar, 7Lyytimäki J Kangas H-L Mervaala E Vikström S Muted by a crisis? COVID-19 and the long-term evolution of climate change newspaper coverage.Sustainability. 2020; 128575Crossref Scopus (18) Google Scholar Currently, although trending downward, the COVID-19 pandemic still occupies a large portion of media coverage compared with other issues. Connecting the pandemic to the 21st century challenges associated with climate change remains important. Failure to make these links between prominent crises such as COVID-19 and climate change leads to ongoing shortcomings in responses, and inadequate engagement and action.8Salas RN Shultz JM Solomon CG The climate crisis and COVID-19—a major threat to the pandemic response.N Engl J Med. 2020; 383: e70Crossref PubMed Scopus (51) Google Scholar Some are optimistic that the ongoing nature of the threat of climate change will lead to increasing links of climate and COVID-19 in the media over time,7Lyytimäki J Kangas H-L Mervaala E Vikström S Muted by a crisis? COVID-19 and the long-term evolution of climate change newspaper coverage.Sustainability. 2020; 128575Crossref Scopus (18) Google Scholar yet time will tell. This Comment can support ongoing examinations of the content and framing of COVID-19 stories,5Bolsen T Palm R Kingsland JT Framing the origins of COVID-19.Sci Commun. 2020; 42: 562-585Crossref Scopus (61) Google Scholar and support considerations of the capacity to respond to science policy collective action problems.9Gemenne F Depoux A What our response to the COVID-19 pandemic tells us of our capacity to respond to climate change.Environ Res Lett. 2020; 15: 1-3Crossref Scopus (3) Google Scholar, 10Obergassel W Hermwille L Oberthür S Harnessing international climate governance to drive a sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.Clim Policy. 2020; (published online Oct 27.)https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2020.1835603Crossref Scopus (36) Google Scholar Further research is needed to explore factors that can best explain these trends and how media coverage can effectively connect the dots between intersecting and significant crises in 2020 and beyond. We declare no competing interests.

COVID-19 media coverage decreasing despite deepening crisis