Infotainment and the Pandemic: A comparative content analysis of the infotainment during consecutive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Media coverage of health issues tends to have a significant impact on health policies by directing public attention to some issues and not others. News coverage of public health cannot remain unaffected dramatisation of the news, while the Media are used to present a health issue in a way that is both entertaining and engaging. The purpose of the current research is to determine whether the infotainment practices observed on the news bulletins under research became more intense in the third wave of the pandemic compared to the second. More specifically, it highlights specific technical aspects of dramatisation (music and sound effects, metaphors and evaluative adjectives) as well as negativity and it crosstabulates them with the news period. The research method implemented is quantitative content analysis considering the news item as unit of analysis. The main finding of the research is that in the Greek case, news dramatization was found to be less intense in the third wave of the pandemic, despite the rise of deaths.