Abstract

The article exposes the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Covid-19 media coverage in Italy, run on the full archive (by Pavia Observatory) of prime-time TV news – Tg1, Tg2, Tg3, Tg4, Tg5, Studio Aperto, and Tg La7 – between February 28, 2020, and February 27, 2021. All verbal contents of TV news have been automatically analyzed, with a total of 2,555 news, whose average duration is 35 minutes, that we broke down into 12,578 entries related to Covid-19. By mostly applying the media framing models, we realized a two-step work: a mapping of media coverage across one year; and an in-depth investigation on the most relevant keywords, and namely gathering and variant. Along with the reflection on the general framing of the pandemic, we will come out with some insights into the framing and blaming strategies built by the Italian mainstream news media.