News and Crisis Policymaking During COVID-19 in Italy: Did the Media Unilaterally Drive Stricter Pandemic Policies Independent of Health Indicators?

The news media plays a critical role in health emergencies by providing relevant information to both the public and policymakers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, media outlets were frequently criticized for amplifying fear, potentially narrowing the range of policy options available to decision-makers and encouraging the adoption of unnecessarily stringent measures. This study focuses on the underexplored influence of legacy media during the pandemic, investigating whether the prevalence of fearful language in the news is systematically associated with stricter COVID-19 policies in Italy. Using a pre-trained BERT model, the emotional tone - fear, joy, sadness, and anger - of 30,412 articles from two major Italian newspapers, La Repubblica and Il Giornale, between 2020 and 2023, has been analyzed. A daily time series was constructed by integrating these measures with the government stringency index from the ‘Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker’. Vector autoregression (VAR) models reveal that increases in emotional language, irrespective of the specific emotion, consistently precede the implementation of stricter policies, suggesting that it is rather the frequency than the emotional appeals of media reporting influencing the Italian policy response to the pandemic. The effect remains evident also when controlling for various health indicators, indicating that the relationship between emotive media coverage and policy dynamics is independent of epidemiological trends. Results have relevant implications for understanding the role of the legacy media in crisis policymaking.