Covid-19 representations in Italian newspapers: A text-based analysis

The paper presents the results of an analysis aimed at mapping the themes through which covid-19 is represented in some Italian newspapers and the semantic structure that grounds and shapes the content of those themes. For this purpose, the ACASM (Automated Co-occurrence Analysis for Semantic Mapping) procedure was used and applied to a text corpus consisting of a set of national newspaper articles balanced by source, political orientation and publication period. The results show that Italian newspapers represented the pandemic according to four specific themes based on two semantic structures. The implications of these results are discussed.