In an article by the New York Times uploaded on the 2nd of February in 2020 in the section global health by Donald G. Mcneil Jr., entitled Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say, about the dangerous Coronavirus spreading around the world.
The ownership filter comes through, as The New York times is an American source, and the U.S and China have problems together. This filter leads the article to further accentuate the weight of the news in order to push people away from visiting China, and contributing to its economical gains. Therefore, the article refers to the habit is using sensational language in the article.
A habit of the media present in the article would be the use of sensational language as to make the news seem more dramatic than it already is through sentences such as “it is an enormous leap beyond what virologists saw when SARS and MERS emerged” (Mcneil, D., 2020). This heavy vocabulary use continues throughout the text, with words such as “catastrophic”, “die”, “deadly”. This way, the news are bound to catch the reader’s eye and concern.
The American bias also comes through the bias statistics and numbers, that focus on scaring the reader, and appealing to their concern, rather than educating them on the numbers of cases and deaths of the case by comparing the numbers to other common diseases’ numbers of cases such as the flu.
February 2nd, 2020 Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say, The New York times, by Donald G. Mcneil Jr. To be retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/health/coronavirus-pandemic-china.html
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