About Face: Hypocrites and Outliers in Canadian News Coverage of Masking and Anti-Masking During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The coronavirus pandemic has generated renewed public debate about different forms of masking. In this article I analyze news frames that circulated in English- language Canadian news outlets throughout 2020, performing an informal discourse analysis of coverage of Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21, alongside coverage of two anti-mask protests held in Aylmer, Ontario. In the case of Bill 21, I argue that the predominant frame that shaped coverage was one of hypocrisy, which foregrounded the discriminatory nature of the legislation but obscured the Christian cultural politics otherwise embedded in the law. In the case of the Aylmer marches, I argue that news coverage centered on the role of the religious outlier, particularly through attention to outspoken Church of God Restoration pastor Rev. Henry Hildebrandt. This frame amplified Hildebrandt’s political statements but downplayed the more quotidian role of conservative Christianity in shaping some anti-mask sentiment. In both cases I argue that attending to the Christian cultural politics which were obscured by dominant news frames can help us better understand the persistent role of religion in shaping public discourse.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".