Politicizing the Pandemic? Partisan Framing of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic Was Infrequent, Particularly in Local Newspapers

Media scholars have long expressed concern that news outlets' tendency to frame policy debates in terms of partisan conflict or political gamesmanship politicizes and polarizes public opinion. This tendency may be particularly problematic with new, highly salient issues like the COVID-19 pandemic during its earliest stages. To evaluate the degree to which coverage of the pandemic in its first months was framed in partisan terms we analyze the content of COVID-19 related articles published on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a random sample of local newspapers between February 21 and May 15, 2020. Contrary to what existing work about the politicization of early-pandemic news coverage might lead us to expect, we find these newspapers employed partisan framings of the pandemic in only about one out of ten articles. However, these frequencies differ dramatically across the kind of newspaper, with the two national papers far more likely to employ partisan framings than the local newspapers, and lower-circulation local papers much less likely to employ partisan framing than higher-circulation local papers. These results suggest that the degree to which news consumers receive partisan-framed messages about the pandemic depends on whether they consume local or national media. Further, the collapse of local news outlets may have led news consumers to see more partisan-framed coverage in the early stages of the pandemic.