The COVID-19 pandemic in the Dutch news. A framing analysis on the representation of COVID-19 by the Dutch online news media in 2020 and 2021.

The COVID-19 virus spread like a wildfire throughout the world in less than half a year and was declared as a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020. Globally, governments have reacted to the crisis by restricting contact through temporary regulations. The magnitude of the coronavirus resulted in an increase in engagement for Dutch news media outlets in 2020 and 2021. Given the news media having the important role of correctly informing the audience, including all information, preventing panic and remaining neutral, it is relevant to analyse how the pandemic was framed by the Dutch news media. Therefore, the framing analysis allows for understanding how the news media decides to emphasize certain elements in an article to push for particular interpretation. Drawing upon the previous literature on news frames, this study investigates how the Dutch news media has shaped the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, through studying what frames can be found in the news articles on COVID-19. Specifically, the goal of this thesis is to answer the question: “How did the Dutch mainstream online media frame COVID-19 during 2020 and 2021?”. To answer this research question 50 news articles from the five most popular and trusted Dutch online news media are investigated. The articles selected are published in 2020 and 2021 and cover five important events that shaped the pandemic. The study uses qualitative content analysis guided by the framing analysis through data- and concept-driven frames. Five data driven frames emerged from the literature review, namely conflict frame, human-interest frame, economic consequences frame, morality frame and responsibility frame. The main findings show similar frames throughout the news articles, with minor differences in complementary frames. The results show that the focus on regulations dominates the framing of the pandemic, demonstrated by the use of two dominant co-occurring frames: the generic responsibility frame and the issue-specific regulations frame. Furthermore, the findings present differences between the fact related news media and more interpretative news media, which include multiple points of view. Based on the findings of this research, the practical advice of including more personal stories through the human-interest frame and attracting attention with the economic consequences frame is given. Additionally, remaining fact-related and including all information and solutions is suggested for the Dutch news media. The results are limited by a number of elements, namely the data size and the exclusion of the framing effects. Therefore, future research may broaden its dataset by focussing on a larger number of news articles, including more events or media and studying the framing effects of the frames found in this thesis.