Author(s)

Nan Li, Ji Qi

Corresponding Author

Nan Li

Abstract

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 broke out and rapidly swept across the globe. Due to the widespread epidemic, the news coverage of Arab mainstream media changes in a volatile realm ranging from the Chinese perspective to the local and international perspective. In this sense, the author conducts a data-driven web news research tracking the Arabic mass online public opinion changes and transformation via co-word analysis and other quantitative content analyzing approaches in the first three months of the outbreak of the epidemic. While taking China-related reports by Arab mainstream media as the main research object to elaborate and analyze, Arabic mainstream news agency’s news frame and agenda priority, as well as Arabic people’s attitude variations and possible corresponding causes, are also scrutinized and summarized. Based on big data analysis, this paper concludes that the first three months of the outbreak of the epidemic was the period with the highest occurrence, along with the largest amount of news reports, and the most complex emotional tendency. Going through four-staged ferments and fluctuations, public opinion embedded in the Arab mainstream is now in a smooth state.

Keywords

Covid-19, China-related reports, Arab mainstream media