The British Press’ Coverage of Coronavirus Threat: A Comparative Analysis Based on Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

The world is living one of the most difficult times at the moment since a pandemic hasbeen declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO, henceforth). In this scenario,information is one of the most powerful tools, not only to just inform, but also to alarmpeople and create panic. The aim of this paper is to make a comparative linguisticanalysis of headlines from serious and sensationalist journalism in the UK. The corpusconsists of a compilation of headlines published over the period of one month (from20th January to 20th February), which have been extracted from four broadsheets: TheGuardian, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Telegraph; and four tabloids:The Sun, The Mirror, The Express and The Daily Mail. The corpus management toolSketch Engine and the programming language R have been used since they allow theuser to carry out both an automatic analysis of the text and basic statistics from Corpus Linguistics.