The start of the Covid pandemic coincided with a significant rise in harassment and discrimination against Chinese and Asian communities, who were blamed and stigmatized for the origins of the virus.  Research from the University of Kansas explores how such discrimination was reported by the media.

Over 450 articles from The Guardian, China Daily, and The New York Times were analyzed during 2020, with the researchers believing that the findings showcase how influential the media is in determining how people think about issues.

“We were interested to examine keywords such as ‘China virus,’ how media represented them and how media-constructed these different terms in talking about COVID-19, racism and xenophobia against Chinese and Asian communities in the West,” the researchers explain. “There has been more than a 150 percent increase in cases of assault, either verbal or physical attacks on Chinese or Asian people on the streets, in stores and everywhere. That piqued our interest to understand how media were using these terms in relation to the racism and xenophobia and how different newspapers are overall constructing the pandemic.”

Public opinion

The research found that coverage typically fell into one of four themes:

• Portrayal of the virus as a threat
• Racialization of COVID-19 as a multifaceted threat
• Calls for collectivization to curb racialization of the virus
• Speculative solutions to end discrimination against Asians.

For instance, both the Guardian and New York Times focused more on the first two themes, whereas China Daily would focus more on the collective need to tackle the virus.  The findings reflect the cultures in the respective countries for each publication.

“The Chinese paper represents sentiments from a Chinese government point of view, and then the other two papers, which also have a wide readership, give us a global overview,” the researchers explain. “And these newspapers pay attention to social issues and cover them extensively. Also, they tend to set the agenda about social issues in the world.”

Racialized coverage

While there was coverage of the socialization of the virus, this was often framed in the context of the deteriorating relationship between China and America, with the Trump administration often using racialized terms to discuss the virus, especially in the early period of the outbreak.

What’s more, while the pandemic was mainly covered in terms of its threat to our health and to the economy, it was also discussed in terms of themes such as misinformation and conspiracy theories.

“Broadly, we talk about this as a health crisis, but COVID-19 is not just a health matter. It’s more of a crisis on many different levels. That’s why we also titled the paper ‘a pandemic of hate,'” the researchers explain. “Pandemics and disease outbreaks have been linked to hate in the past. The COVID-19 crisis emerged as a multifaceted, very complex type of crisis. It is not only financial, cultural, political and social, but also racism has been increased with it and emphasized by right-wing media outlets and politicians. It’s about health, race and xenophobia.”

The authors explain that their findings demonstrate the importance of the media in shaping our opinions.  Even if they only report the use of xenophobic terms by prominent politicians, this can still shape global discourse and reinforce harassment and discrimination.  They urge public figures, and indeed the media, to exercise more caution when they name and discuss health crises.

“When something is unknown, people will try to name it. With this being unknown, people started trying to name this virus with names of places,” the authors conclude. “People understand and share common ideas through social constructions, so what they construct about an issue, they share. We see here, with COVID-19, the popular view or social construction was this virus is a Chinese virus. This social construction was amplified in the media and in the minds of people, and this is what people tended to believe. SRT suggests the way you name something and anchor it tends to make society think about it in a certain way.”