April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Global News Coverage of Government Responsibility for COVID-19 Healthcare: Community Structure Theory & Health/Resource Privilege
Community structure theory (Pollock, 2007, 2013a, 2013b, 2015) compared national characteristics and cross-national newspaper coverage of COVID-19 healthcare access in leading newspapers, in 26 countries, analyzing articles of 250+ words from 12/08/2020 to 09/19/2021. The resulting 624 total articles were coded for “prominence” and “direction” (“government responsibility,” “society responsibility,” or “balanced/neutral” coverage) and combined into composite “Media Vector” scores for each newspaper (range 0.4777-0.0130: range 0.4647). Twenty three of the 26 (88%) of Media Vectors registered “government responsibility” for addressing healthcare access during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, measures of privilege (especially resource privilege) were robustly connected to media coverage supporting government responsibility to provide COVID-19 healthcare, confirming the “buffer” hypothesis: privilege associated with empathic coverage of human rights claims, in this case health access rights (Pollock, 2007, pp. 61-100). Electricity production was significantly linked with media emphasis on government responsibility to provide COVID-19 healthcare (r = 0.484, p = 0.006). Indicators of healthcare access privilege, male life expectancy at birth (r=0.558, p=0.002) and female life expectancy at birth (r=0.488, p=0.006), were also associated significantly with reporting emphasizing government responsibility for COVID-19. Political stability, in the form of a Global Peace Index – where negative values register greater political stability (r = -0.472, p = 0.007), and other measures of communication, economic, and female privilege were significantly associated with media emphasis on government responsibility. By contrast, measures of vulnerability were significantly linked to media emphasis on “less” government responsibility to provide COVID-19 healthcare. Political stability, along with healthcare and resource privilege, deserve considerable attention. Political stability provides the potential for privilege to flower, especially in the areas of healthcare and resource privilege. Since electricity production is a modern form of energy prevalent in more “privileged” countries with higher levels of GDP/capita and healthcare, the connection between electricity production and broad measures of national privilege confirms the buffer hypothesis: privilege associated with empathic coverage or government responsibility for the most vulnerable, in this case, those at risk for COVID-19. The findings about “resource privilege” are consistent with previous cross-national community structure research on coverage of women’s reproductive rights (Buonauro, et. al., 2017) and human trafficking (Purandare, et al., 2021). Findings about “health privilege” linked to government responsibility are also consistent with previous research on coverage of COVID-19 (Fleischman, et al., 2021) and climate change (El Akbani, et al., 2021). Empirically, regression analysis revealed that electricity production, measuring resource privilege, accounted for 37.8% of the variance associated with media emphasis on government responsibility to provide COVID-19 healthcare. By contrast, poverty level, measuring vulnerability, accounted for 17.8% of the variance associated with media emphasis on less government responsibility for COVID-19 healthcare. Methodologically, combining measures of both “prominence” and “direction” generated sensitive Media Vectors highlighting the capacity of media to reflect (nation-state) community measures of “privilege” and “vulnerability.” Theoretically, this COVID-19 study 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).