Portraying the Pandemic: Analysis of Textual-Visual Frames in German News Coverage of COVID-19 on Twitter

The novel coronavirus disease (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) resulted in a severe global pandemic in 2020. Amid the unprecedented health crisis, visuals play important roles in media framing and health crisis communication. This article provides one of the first analyses of textual-visual news concerning COVID-19 posted by two leading German newspapers on Twitter. Our objective is to integrate texts and visuals into framing analysis to better understand the multimodal news presentation of health crises. A quantitative content analysis of 2479 tweets examined nine news frames, among which politics and instructions, update information, economic impact and social impact presented more thematic salience. The semiotic signs of indexical, symbolic and iconic appeared in news visuals and served evidential, performative and illustrative functions. The results also detected recurrent news visuals in the color-clustered patterns. Notably, an alluvial diagram revealed the connections between textual frames and visual signs across three crisis phases. In recognizing the diverse roles of visuals in constructing mediated reality, this article demonstrates the value in the multimodal framing of health crises and suggests expanding our focus to risk cultures for future international comparative research.