The Mediated Construction of Crises—Combining Automated and Qualitative Content Analysis to Investigate the Use of Crisis Labels in Headlines of Swiss News Media between 1998 and 2020

Abstract

The recent accumulation of crises has led scholars to diagnose that crises increasingly dominate news headlines. However, there is little empirical evidence for this diagnosis because previous research often misses the longitudinal perspective. To address this gap in research, we used automated content analysis to investigate to what extent five Swiss newspapers used the crisis label in their headlines between 1998 and 2020. In the next step, we applied topic modeling to the dataset of 10,458 articles with crisis labels in their headlines to detect which topics were covered under the crisis label. Finally, we used a qualitative content analysis to name and describe the automatically identified topics. Our exploratory longitudinal design calls into question the diagnosis of the increasing use of crisis labels in media reporting. Instead, the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic stand out as strong drivers of crisis labeling in headlines.