COVID-19 Lockdown in New York: A News Comparison Between the New York Times and Vice News

The Corona virus or also known as COVID-19 has raged the world with a devastating number of lives that were lost. During the lockdown and in the times of chaos, many have relied on the media for information to keep abreast with the updates of this angry virus. The objective of this study was to find out the differences of news coverage concerning the Covid-19 pandemic between mainstream and alternative media in New York City, where it hit the worst. The New York Times and Vice News were chosen to represent the mainstream and alternative news stations, respectively. The methodology used was a qualitative content analysis to organize, extract and understand the large data sets and derive conclusions. Conclusively, this analysis is based on four criteria’s: headlines, sources, language, and visual images. A summary of the headline regarding the alternative resultantly informs us that Vice incorporates a majority of vague, misleading titles while contrastingly, the New York Times incorporates accurate and informative titles. Dissimilarities also occur with sources where a majority of citations are composed of sole informants for Vice News and multiple sources for the New York Times; authoritative and non-authoritative.