La copertura informativa dell’espansione del coronavirus nella stampa generalista spagnola

In the present work we analyze a corpus made up of 664 journalistic texts appeared in the Spanish newspaper El País between January and March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a methodology that combines discourse analysis, specifically frame analysis, and corpus linguistics, we study the way in which news regarding the pandemic and the virus evolved, which went through three phases: a mere informative and almost aseptic approach, an anti-alarmist approach, dominated by the call for calm, and finally a media blast where news related to the virus permeated any
area of the information. This change in the frame causes contradictions and a possible loss of credibility of the media.