This study examined the extent to which leading Western news networks had influenced the local framing of COVID-19 news in Bangladesh, a small South Asian country, considering geographic and economic terms. Using a qualitative content analysis complemented by a computational text analysis method, this study analysed over 5,300 news stories about the COVID-19 pandemic published in a significant Bangladeshi news network called bdnews24.com that supplies news to other local news outlets. The findings show that the West-headquartered networks such as Reuters and The New York Times substantially influenced the pandemic’s regional coverage. While a vast majority of the pandemic-related stories published on bdnews24.com came from the global news networks, the ones authored by bdnews24.com’s journalists used the six frames, namely consequence, uncertainty, action, reassurance, conflict and new evidence, prominent in the West-headquartered networks.
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