ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic the discourse on social distancing has become very prominent and often political. This chapter has two objectives: 1) to test two competing hypotheses about sentiment toward social distancing expressed on US cable news channels during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2) to demonstrate how to conduct such an analysis. The chapter begins by describing the differences between liberals and conservatives in relation to social distancing, and the corresponding partisan news coverage. Observers have suggested that as political polarization has increased, ideology has become a key determinant of how news is framed. Nevertheless, critical theorists would argue that the capitalist system’s profit motive circumscribes the range of ideology. The theoretical contrast leads to two hypotheses. One is that ideology accounts for the sentiment expressed toward social distancing, while the other is that market share growth is a better predictor. Semantic network analysis of snippets of television transcripts mentioning “social distancing” in Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN obtained from GDELT enabled testing these hypotheses. Our findings indicate that more than ideology, market share growth can better explain the different sentiments of social distancing among those television channels.
