ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1581167
Media's role in the crisis: a discursive comparison of U.S. media representation of unemployment in 2008 and 2020
Provisionally accepted
Ling Yang1
Lingli Yu2*- 1Anhui University, Hefei, Anhui Province, China
- 2Ningbo University, Ningbo, China
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Through varying the volume and discursive strategies of reporting, the media communicates risks to the public and shapes perceptions during crises. This study employs a corpus-based, quantitative analysis of topoi in American newspapers during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to compare media representations of unemployment. It identifies four recurrent topoi shared across both crises, which characterize media's reports on unemployment. However, differences in other recurrent topoi reflect variations in the crises' causes, unemployment dynamics, and social policy responses. These findings reveal distinct media influences on the evolution of the crises and unemployment. By examining the effectiveness of media strategies in addressing unemployment, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between media, discourse analysis, and crisis management during major economic disruptions.
Keywords: Unemployment, discursive comparison, topoi, media, Crisis
Received: 10 Apr 2025; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yang and Yu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lingli Yu, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China
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