THE ITALIAN NEWSPAPERS’ NARRATIVE ON DISTANCE LEARNING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic had enormous consequences on the worldwide social, economic and cultural system. To contain the spread of the virus, many countries have implemented restrictive measures to limit physical contact, including the temporary closure of educational institutions of all grades and the introduction of distance learning. However, although distance learning has ensured educational continuity, it has highlighted our unpreparedness as a society to use digital tools adequately. In this context, media play a fundamental role in shaping public opinion about events of interest and can contribute to the development of a better informed public debate. Therefore, studying newspapers’ narratives about distance learning can help understand how newspapers reported it and their potential influence on readers’ perceptions. To this end, we exploited text mining methods and lexical correspondence analysis on four Italian journals included in the LexisNexis news database. In particular, we used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and Correspondence Analysis on Generalised Aggregated Lexical Tables (CA- GALT) to analyse the content of the newspaper collection. The results showed that the newspapers’ narratives about distance learning changed during the period considered, both concerning the topics covered and the reference journal.