Corpus-Assisted Framing Analysis of Italian Newspaper Discourse on Diabetes Before and During COVID-19 Pandemic: a case study on La Repubblica

Luca Giordano

Abstract: The term "diabetes" encompasses type 1, gestational and type 2 diabetes. All diabetic subjects, regardless of type, risk serious COVID-19 complications. In news coverage, this important type distinction is often ignored, and the causes for the condition are framed as mostly behavioural, rather than also medical and societal, promoting blame and stigma. This study aims to fill the research gap on the framing of diabetes discourse in Italian news to allow comparisons with other findings and to compare framing before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis was conducted on a subset of the TRADISAN corpus containing all health-related news published by Italian newspaper La Repubblica in three years prior to the pandemic (2017-2019) and during the pandemic (2020-2022). The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses allow for three main observations: 1) diabetes coverage by La Repubblica decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2) the type distinction was almost always ignored, and 3) the framing of diabetes shifted from depicting it as an individual battle and behavioral issue before the pandemic to emphasizing medical factors and related pathologies, especially in relation to COVID-19, during the pandemic. These findings highlight a significant shift in the discourse surrounding diabetes, underscoring the need for more nuanced reporting, achievable both by mentioning the types of diabetes and by considering medical and societal factors instead of only behavioural ones.