Media representation of COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on Australian hospitality businesses

Abstract

Representation of a phenomenon in media can impact and shape particular public beliefs, and attitudes and can contribute to social change. As the social role of the hospitality industry has become more salient, this study aims to investigate the representation of COVID-19 and its impact on the Australian hospitality businesses in news articles. Those news articles focus on the hospitality industry in Australia published in the outlets, such as Hospitality Directory, The Hotel Conversation, ABC News, Gourmet Traveller, nine News, and Business News Australia. Using corpus linguistics analysis (CL), we revealed that COVID-19 has been mainly represented as a new and current outbreak that threatened community health and caused restrictions, responses and measures that had to be put in place.