Could we have acted sooner? How many lives would we have saved if we had quarantined, closed the schools, and worn masks just two weeks earlier? These are questions that will haunt us for years to come. We know from previous pandemics that responding early to the threat can save lives. The first COVID-19 case in the United States was reported on January 15, 2020 in Washington State. On March 11, President Trump told the American public that the United States had the “best economy, the most advanced healthcare, and the most talented doctors, scientists, and researchers anywhere in the world” (Trump, 2020). That same day, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. By March 16, 27 states and territories had closed their schools, with non-essential businesses following suit. 

In the two months between the first COVID-19 case and the shutting down of the country, Americans paid surprisingly little attention to the rising threat. An examination of national Google searches made by Americans in these months finds that searches for the virus remained relatively low, beginning to make a statistical difference on January 20, peaking on January 31 with a score of 25-out-of-100 (with 100 representing a critical mass of widespread interest in a topic on Google), then dissipating until turning upwards again on February 24, finally peaking at 100 on March 11. When the NBA stopped its season on March 11, many Americans had given little to no thought to the proximal realities of the crisis. Many assumed it was a distant problem happening in China and Italy–an issue that American experts knew how to handle. At the same time, a dangerous counter-narrative that COVID-19 was a hoax orchestrated to bring down president Trump gained significant traction among a large group of conservative Americans. This disinformation encouraged listeners and viewers to ignore the warning signs of the pandemic. Disregarding the virus became a a test of one’s political loyalties and a way that people could perform their cultural identities in public. In addition, as the historian Charles Rosenberg has noted, societies are inclined to deny that an epidemic is happening early-on (Rosenberg, 1989). People have busy, precarious lives that would be disrupted by such an event, and they are loathe to incite panic. Only when the bodies start to accumulate do officials and general populations face up to what is happening. 

Epidemiologists agree that widespread public compliance with quarantining is the most critical component in addressing a pandemic. The best and only way to achieve this compliance is through effective messaging and information sharing (Merchant et all, 2020). Given that the general public in the United States was unprepared for quarantining and the realities of the threat in mid-March, was it because a failure in messaging occurred? If so, from whom? Scholars have already begun to tackle these questions. Some have levelled critiques at the CDC and the WHO. They released daily reports daily throughout January and February of 2020. And yet, as Holly Wilkin has noted, their messaging was often confusing and contradictory (Marquez, 2021). Others, ourselves included, have lodged searing critiques at the feet of Donald Trump and his supporters like Rush Limbaugh. While Trump refused to issue federal social distancing mandates or to wear masks, Limbaugh repeatedly told his 38 million listeners that the virus was a hoax. 

Insufficient attention has been paid, however to the role that mainstream media played in spreading awareness about the virus. The purpose of our research was to determine if the American media contributed to the relative ignorance of the American public towards the looming danger of COVID-19 in the first 68 days of 2020. Did they fail to cover the rising pandemic, or, was there something about their coverage that distracted us from the threat? 

To answer these questions, our team of researchers set out to look closely at how the major American news networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox news) covered the novel coronavirus from January 1 to March 11, 2020. To do this, researchers downloaded every news story from the outlets’ archives and websites from these days into a large database that could handle natural language analysis. This included every printed story that was available through each outlets’ website. We then used inclusive, language algorithms to search through the database for stories related to the new coronavirus. Once those stories had been identified, we examined them individually to ensure that they dealt with the new coronavirus and to throw away any outliers. We identified 1844 stories in total. We then tagged those stories with the geographic region that they covered, sorting for stories on China, Italy, the United States, and a remaining catch-all category called “Other,” which included general messaging and the smaller number of stories related to other parts of the world. Our raw data can be seen here. 

We asked two categories of questions of our data. The first related to the time and quantity of coverage given by the networks to the virus. This included understanding how much coverage of the novel coronavirus the networks provided. Did they differ from each other in their coverage? Were their moments when their level of coverage shifted, and if so, what were they? The second category of questions related to the types of stories that the networks recounted. Did the networks focus on different topics? Did watching one network over another indicate the kinds of stories one might read?  In other words, were the networks independent of the stories they told, or were they contingent?