The dynamics of television and online media coverage of COVID-19–related topics: an intermedia agenda-setting perspective

Most researchers agree that mainly due to the competitive news market principles (i.e., where economic benefits and the struggle for attention are at the top), news media outlets tend to borrow story ideas from each other. Nonetheless, issues such as (a) the extent to which different media adopt each other’s issue agendas when covering news, (b) the direction of influence, and (c) the time needed for one topic to migrate from one agenda to another are still debatable, and subject to cultural background influence. In this context, based on the intermedia agenda-setting theory, we content analyzed 1511 television and online news stories covering COVID-19–related topics released during March 18-31, 2020. This timeframe covers a peak-event period referring to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and also to the nationwide lockdown in Romania. The content analysis was undertaken on the news stories broadcasted on three prime-time television newscasts from Romania (two commercial and one public) – PRO TV, ANTENA 1 and TVR 1 (N=666) – and on the news stories published by two Romanian online newspapers (one broadsheet and one tabloid) – adevarul.ro and libertatea.ro (N=845). Findings show that online news stories, social media stories and television stories are frequently transferred between media outlets. Intermedia agenda for TV channels happens mostly by citing social media sources (13.6%), online news (12.7%), or other TV news stories (9%). For online newspapers, the media outlets from which information is taken are mainly online news stories (either own previous stories or other online sources, 60.9%), social media information (19.2%), and TV news stories (6.4%). 16.8% of the total sample of online news stories provide specific reference to the source (by offering the link and the date of publication). Of these, 67.7% refer to stories published by other news sources while 32.4% explicitly refer to stories previously published by the same newspaper (follow-up stories). Related to the same subsample of online news stories, findings reveal that the average lag between the first cited source and the time the story was first posted online is 393 minutes (approx. 7 hours) for the news stories published by other news sources and 1165 minutes (approx. 19 hours) for the news stories published by the same newspaper. Overall, our findings capture the dynamics of media coverage of COVID-19–related topics released in a peak-event period. Specifically, results show that both television and online news outlets tend to borrow story ideas from one another. Results about the time lag allow assuming that we can talk about the “intraday intermedia agenda-setting”. These results could be useful for more in-depth investigations into the way in which such dynamics of topics could influence people’s knowledge, opinions, and attitudes, but also raise the problem of time pressure in reporting news, especially during crises periods, which could lead to a wide dissemination of both valuable and “polluted” information.