Fig. 4: Sensationalism of news media articles by news outlet and country of publication.
From: News media coverage of COVID-19 public health and policy information
Scores for six sensationalism questions (SI Coding Tool) are shown (mean, 95% confidence interval) for articles (n = 1331) communicating COVID-19 public health or policy information (Fig. 2): (A) exposing, (B) speculating, (C) generalizing, (D) warning, (E) extolling, and (F) global assessment (i.e., an overall assessment of the degree of sensationalism in the article). Each question was evaluated on a scale from 1 to 5 (5 corresponding to highest sensationalism). Sampled articles were published between 1 March and 15 August 2020 (Methods). Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance and post-hoc multi-comparison test statistics are in SI Table S3.
