Media framing of COVID-19 pandemic in the transitional regime of Serbia: Exploring discourses and strategies

Abstract

The subject of this study is media discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic in the Republic of Serbia. The study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the communication aspects of the current public health crisis within the transitional (hybrid) regime of Serbia. One of the paper’s objectives is to explore how Serbian media frame the discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic. The second objective is to examine whether journalists produce investigative and analytical contents on this pressing topic independently or just mediate to the public patterns created by the public health crisis management. By applying language analysis and intertextual analysis methods to a sample of 230 media texts, we point to the incoherence of media discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as to the lack of media independence in an environment of the permanent political campaign.