Mass Media as a Mirror of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The media plays an important role in disseminating facts and knowledge to the public at critical times, and the COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of such a period. This research is devoted to performing a comparative analysis of the representation of topics connected with the pandemic in the internet media of Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation. The main goal of the research is to propose a method that would make it possible to analyze the correlation between mass media dynamic indicators and the World Health Organization COVID-19 data. In order to solve the task, three approaches related to the representation of mass media dynamics in numerical form—automatically obtained topics, average sentiment, and dynamic indicators—were proposed and applied according to a manually selected list of search queries. The results of the analysis indicate similarities and differences in the ways in which the epidemiological situation is reflected in publications in Russia and in Kazakhstan. In particular, the publication activity in both countries correlates with the absolute indicators, such as the daily number of new infections, and the daily number of deaths. However, mass media tend to ignore the positive rate of confirmed cases and the virus reproduction rate. If we consider strictness of quarantine measures, mass media in Russia show a rather high correlation, while in Kazakhstan, the correlation is much lower. Analysis of search queries revealed that in Kazakhstan the problem of fake news and disinformation is more acute during periods of deterioration of the epidemiological situation, when the level of crime and poverty increase. The novelty of this work is the proposal and implementation of a method that allows the performing of a comparative analysis of objective COVID-19 statistics and several mass media indicators. In addition, it is the first time that such a comparative analysis, between different countries, has been performed on a corpus in a language other than English.