Representations of the COVID-19 Pandemic in German and Spanish Newspaper Headlines: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The aim of this study is to find out the medial representation of COVID-19 pandemic in western media. The corpus is comprised of newspaper headlines that are published in Germany’s and Spain’s highest circulation centre left daily newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and El País, that deal with Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The headlines havebeen examined with the CDA methods of Teun van Djik (2013; 2015). Moving towards the medial representation of Coronavirus in selected headlines, this paper also tries to investigate the way how COVID-19 virus was presented as a dangerous threat to the public and as a mechanism of ‘othering’.According to the results of the analysis, both newspapers intend to frame COVID-19 virus as a global health crisis which resulted from China’s incompetence and mishandling.The results of this study also show that both newspapers frame the disease by using the same lexicon in their headlines.