Politicization and Polarization of Local Pandemic Media Coverage in the United States During 2020

As the United States federal government largely abdicated responsibility for managing the COVID-19 pandemic early in its emergence, mainstream and online conversations about the public health crisis were quickly politicized and polarized across partisan lines. While it is an international crisis, the ramifications of COVID-19 are often local, and local news media have played a critical role in disseminating information as the pandemic evolves. Here, we use a large corpus of local media news stories, structural topic modeling, and clustering analysis to determine to what extent local media followed the queues of national and online media in politicizing and polarizing COVID-19 stories. We find that while there is clear politicization of the pandemic—with politicians being mentioned across topics far more than public health experts—there is a lack of political polarization in local news media outlets. We discuss the implications this has for using local media as a unifying medium in public health communication.