April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Cross-national News Coverage of Government COVID-19 Mental Health Responses: Community Structure Theory & Privileged Health Access
A community structure analysis (Pollock, 2007, 2013a, 2013b, 2015) compared national characteristics and cross-national newspaper coverage of government responses to the COVID-19 mental health burden in leading newspapers/wire services in 19 different countries, examining all relevant articles of 250+ words selected from 09/28/2020 to 10/22/20211. The resulting 339 articles were coded for “prominence” (placement, headline size, article length, and presence of graphics) and “direction” (“government responsibility”, “societal responsibility”, or “balanced/neutral” coverage of the COVID-19 mental health burden), then combined into composite “Media Vector” scores for each newspaper, from 0.2499 to -0.2813, with a range of 0.5312. Ten of 19 Media Vectors (53%), just over half, emphasized government responsibility for the COVID-19 mental health burden. Overall, measures of privilege (especially communication and economic privilege) were strongly associated with media coverage supporting government responsibility for the COVID-19 mental health burden, confirming the “buffer” hypothesis: privilege associated with empathic coverage of human rights claims (Pollock, 2007, pp. 61-100). Daily newspapers/1,000 (r = 0.754, p = 0.000), and broadband subscriptions/100 (r =0.605, p = 0.001), along with GDP/capita (r = 0.590, p = 0.004), and stock of direct foreign investment (r = 0.546, p = 0.008) were robustly associated with media emphasizing government responsibility for COVID-19 mental health burdens. Also confirming the buffer hypothesis were measures of health access: male life expectancy (r = 0.528, p = 0.010), midwives/100,000 (r = 0.525, p = 0.010), female life expectancy (r = 0.427, p = 0.034), and physicians/100,000 (r = 0.391, p = 0.049), all associated with media emphasis on government responsibility for the COVID-19 mental health burden. Male life expectancy and midwives/100,000, both broad indicators of health privilege, together accounted for approximately 83% of variance in media coverage. Male life expectancy often varies directly with income and education level. Midwives are traditionally involved in the daily lives of their patients, nurturing relationships with patients likely to be highly interpersonal and frequent, often living in the communities they serve, and employing traditional methods reflecting local cultural norms. Midwives are more prevalent in more “privileged” countries with higher levels of GDP/capita, broadband subscriptions/100, and higher male and female life expectancies. These findings connecting “privilege” and media emphasis on “government responsibility” are consistent with previous community structure research on cross-national coverage of human trafficking (Alexandre, et al., 2014, 2015), HIV/AIDS treatment access (Etheridge, et al., 2014, 2015), and government responses to COVID-19 (Fleischman, et al., 2021). Regression analysis revealed that male life expectancy accounted for 57.1% of the variance, and along with midwives/100,000 (25.8%), stock of direct foreign investment (4.0%), and percent of girls married before 18 (4.9%), collectively totaled 91.8% of the variance associated with media emphasis on government responsibility for the COVID-19 mental health burden. From a theoretical perspective, this study on the COVID-19 mental health burden confirmed empirical evidence from a founder of agenda-setting theory, asserting that agenda-setting’s “top down” perspective is robustly complemented by the “bottom-up” viewpoint of community structure theory’s community-level demographics (Funk & McCombs, 2017).