Agenda-setting and COVID-19 crisis: the case of Austria

With the COVID-19 cases originating in the ski resorts, Austria was one of the first COVID-19 hotspots in Europe. It led to a swift crisis response from the Austrian government and the decision on lockdown that limited social and economic life within the country. In times of crisis and uncertainty, the role of the media in communicating government policies to tackle the crisis is crucial. This paper explores how the media responded to the government agenda, i.e., COVID-19 legislation from March 2020 till the second lockdown in November 2020, shedding light on the agenda-setting process in COVID-19 crisis. We focus on the content and style of reporting on the COVID-19 legislation, analysing to what extent the media and government agendas converged and how did the media report on the it, assessing the tone and investigating the factors impacting the media coverage on the COVID-19 crisis in Austria. The paper relies on two unique automatically coded datasets: a dataset on the COVID-19 legislation and a dataset comprising online coverage of eight major Austrian news media.