Emotional profiling and cognitive networks unravel how mainstream and alternative press framed AstraZeneca, Pfizer and COVID-19 vaccination campaigns.

ABSTRACT: COVID-19 vaccines have been largely debated by the press. To understand how mainstream and alternative media debated vaccines, we introduce a paradigm reconstructing time-evolving narrative frames via cognitive networks and natural language processing. We study Italian news articles massively re-shared on Facebook/Twitter (up to 5 million times), covering 5745 vaccine-related news from 17 news outlets over 8 months. We find consistently high trust/anticipation and low disgust in the way mainstream sources framed "vaccine/vaccino". These emotions were crucially missing in alternative outlets. News titles from alternative sources framed "AstraZeneca" with sadness, absent in mainstream titles. Initially, mainstream news linked mostly "Pfizer" with side effects (e.g. "allergy", "reaction", "fe

SUBMITTER: Semeraro A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9400577 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature