Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how Canadian newspapers reported on COVID-19 from 2020 to 2023 in Ontario, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. Using Van Dijk’s ten micro-strategies, this study examines articles from six newspapers across five time periods to explore how discursive tactics were employed, how their application varied by region and over time, and what ideological functions they served. The study employs a comparative and chronological approach, demonstrating how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can reveal regional differences and long-term trends in crisis reporting. The findings show that Canadian newspapers primarily relied on authority, number games, and metaphors, employing expert voices, statistical data, and figurative language to frame the pandemic. Strategies such as hyperbole, national self-glorification, and polarization appeared less frequently, suggesting that Canadian coverage leaned toward moderation rather than extreme sensationalism. Regional variation in coverage of the pandemic included Saskatchewan’s stronger emphasis on quantification and Ontario and British Columbia’s greater reliance on authority. Over time, reporting shifted from fear-based dramatization in the early stages of the pandemic toward reassurance and institutional trust in later periods. These patterns reveal a dual ideological function: Canadian newspapers both amplify fear through dramatization and metaphors and reassure the public by referencing official sources and statistics. This duality reflects and reinforces Canada’s institutional culture of moderation and collective responsibility, striking a balance between urgency and stability. At the same time, newspapers often constrained public debate by prioritizing institutional perspectives and providing limited space for community voices or frontline experiences. This study broadens Van Dijk’s framework for comparative and longitudinal analysis, advancing methodological innovation in CDA and offering new insights into crisis communication. It demonstrates that newspapers function not only as sources of information but also as discursive agents that shape public narratives during times of uncertainty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".