Media Visibility of the World Health Organization during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The paper explores how visible the World Health Organization (WHO) has been in online media across the world in connection to the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper thus maps the WHO’s ability to be seen and referred to in connection to the pandemic, both during the critical phasis of its outbreak in Spring 2020 and later till Spring 2021. The public visibility of the organization is understood as a necessary condition for, and a building block of, the organization’s perceived expert (epistemic) authority, with regard to the set of challenges connected with SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19. The paper considers the pandemic and the media coverage of the WHO from three analytical standpoints. First, I provide a baseline map of the relative intensity with which Covid-19 pandemic has been referred to in online media, over time. Due to the highly uneven spread of the disease across regions, at various points in time, significant temporal and spatial variation can be identified. Second, I estimate the prominence of the WHO in online articles referring to Covid-19. I map how frequently the WHO has been referred to by media when discussing Covid-19. This standpoint lies at the core of the article, because it is this visibility of the WHO in connection to the pandemic that constitutes a key precondition for its perceived expert authority. Third, the analysis traces the likely impact of specific WHO’s steps on the intensity of coverage of Covid-19 in media, in particular in the period of the epidemic/pandemic outbreak in January-March 2020 and following the announcement of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in connection to ‘2019-nCoV’ on January 30, 2020. Empirically, the paper is based on a large new dataset mapping to the content of more than 20 000 online media outlets from close to 200 countries, in 2020 and in early 2021. A probabilistic sample from more than 10 million articles in the given period is used. The significance of the media outlets assessed with the use of web traffic data; automated content translation is applied to a sample of non-English texts. This robust data infrastructure allows us to draw a uniquely rich and comprehensive picture of the visibility of the WHO in media in connection to the Covid-19 pandemic. This, in turn, helps us understand the role the WHO played in dealing with it, and the grounds for its perceived expert authority in matters related to the health-dimension of the Covid-19 crisis.