Feeling and coping. An investigation into the emotions in media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary.

During the months of physical distancing and restrictions, when individuals are confronted with multiple crises, news media serve as a compass to give orientation to the audiences’ affective state of mind. Despite the growing number of studies indicating the emerging affective media ecosystem, many aspects of the mechanisms involved in the emotionally loaded reporting are still unclear. The coronavirus epidemic offers an academically valuable situation to dig deeper into the characteristics of emotions in news media content. Our research examines the emotions in the media coverage of the disease and its socio-economic, political impact in Hungary. We propose a quantitative analysis of the articles’ contents according to the Warren TenHouten’s categories of emotions. The four pairs of opposite primary emotions such as acceptance and disgust, joy and sadness, anger and fear, anticipation and surprise are analysed to map out to what extent the online newspapers used the emotional words and which were the most dominant in their Covid-19 related articles. With corpus linguistics’ technique, we defined the list of expressions, which potentially indicate the display of the TenHouten’s primary emotions. We collected data from the 20 most read online news media portals in Hungary between March 4 (Hungary’s first confirmed coronavirus case) and December 31, 2020. After the random selection of 5% of the 183 264 Covid-19 related news items, the database contains 9 163 articles which was manually coded by trained coders in fixed categories (Krippendorff 's α: 0.82). The study reveals that altogether approximately 25% of the sampled articles contains emotive expressions, but it significantly varies by platforms. We also discovered differences between pro-government news portals and those which are critical towards the current Hungarian government: more fear, sadness and pessimistic anticipation about the Covid-19 are detected in the coverage of anti-government outlet, for example. Time also matters: as the pandemic situation changes in Hungary, so too does the frequency of the used emotional expressions – mainly in the case of anger and anticipation – when journalists cover the disease and its consequences. Data suggest that online news media portals offer emotion-focused coping by delivering direct messages to the audience about the modification of feelings (“be careful”; “do not panic”; “we should find the joy in the simple things”; etc). We argue that such diverse use of emotional expressions and connotations (like metaphors) intentionally and selectively interpret the meaning of an event or a situations, therefore offers the subjective (re)evaluation of the covered story. By giving more visibility to certain affective states and directly propagating changes in the emotions, the web-based newspapers take an active part in the cognitive reappraisal of Covid-19 in public discourses in Hungary. We conclude that, on the one hand, the emotive components of the online news media’s coverage mirror the volatile emotional states and losing self-control of people and the journalists themselves. On the other hand, the display of emotions can be interpreted as the news portals’ contribution to the emotion regulatory processes during these difficult times. (co-authors: Lilla Szabó and Balázs Kiss)