Public health intervention: Exploring crisis communication elements in media reports on COVID-19 in Bangladesh

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the public health, as well as the economic and sociocultural dimensions of many societies. By publishing news with various frames, the media plays an informative and discursive role in ensuring that the public stay informed and help one another in containing the virus and alleviating the adverse effects of the pandemic. This paper aims to explore the crisis communication elements in the media framing of COVID-19 in Bangladesh. The contents of two major dailies, The Daily Star and The Business Standard, were analysed to determine the framing of COVID-19 news. For the study period, 34 news stories that met the inclusion criteria were selected for analysis. The analysis of data reveals that COVID-19 was framed using the following frames: mortality-casualty, treatment-management, active-participation, collective-altruistic narratives, economic crisis, international relations, and fake news. The study also demonstrates that these identified frames have crisis communication elements that may be effective in crafting messages to address the pandemic with implications for public health interventions. The paper argues that news framing has a crucial function during a pandemic in ensuring that the news reports foster discourses among the media, government, and the public, to shape public health policies for the greatest good of the society.