An analysis of health journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic

The novel coronavirus, dubbed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization and first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, spread rapidly worldwide and developed into a global health crisis affecting all areas of life. During this chaotic time, when the public's need for information was at its greatest, the importance and responsibility of the press as a news source increased significantly. With this in mind, the study aims to investigate how the news about COVID-19 is treated in the print media in the context of health journalism and how the news is handled in terms of discourse. The sample for the study consists of news articles from two newspapers with different editorial policies, Sabah and Cumhuriyet. A total of 28 news articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed using Teun A. van Dijk's critical discourse analysis method. Due to the uncertainty since the outbreak of the coronavirus, the news on the first page of the digital archive of the printed editions of Sabah and Cumhuriyet newspapers was selected from May 1 to 31, 2020, when the lockdowns were still ongoing and then normalization began. The analysis included various elements such as headlines, lead stories, images used in the news, and word choice, and it examined how language is used in health journalism from a macro- and micro-structural perspective. The findings suggest that the content creation and presentation methods in both newspapers generally involve different discourses, with recognizable differences in discourse, language, expression, and presentation style in relation to COVID-19-related news in both newspapers.