Vakserska i antivakserska retorika u britanskim elektoroničkim medijima tijekom prvog i drugog vala pandemije Covida-19

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic shook the world in 2020, and the aftermath can still be felt today. Scientists were working on a vaccine to help people, but that only brought up another problem. It led to the resurgence of the anti-vax movement, with anti-vax protests being staged all over the world. The movement gained momentum fast and anti-vax misinformation could be found anywhere. This is also closely connected to rhetoric, the main topic of this research. The media did report on vaccines, but what kind of job did they do in their reporting. This was the main idea behind the paper. Previous studies did show in what way anti-vax rhetoric was spread and the strategies they used. This served as the stepping stone for this research, which focuses on digital written media and the rhetoric that was being used when talking about vaccination related topics during the first and second wave of the pandemic, when the vaccines were still a fresh topic of discussion. The goal of this research was to map differences in rhetoric use between newspapers and to see how they handled the reporting of vaccination-related topics. A corpus of articles from The Guardian and The Daily Mail was analysed in this paper, with each newspaper representing opposing political stances. The research is based on the qualitative analysis of the corpus, with research questions being inspired by similar studies done on this topic. Results match previous studies, with both newspapers using balanced reporting in relation to the topic. The main difference being in the way these newspapers used rhetoric to convey information. These findings are significant, because they can be used to address shortcomings when reporting on important topics such as Covid-19 and the vaccine