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Top1. Introduction
Indian mass media plays a very important role in shaping our country especially the news media (Ram, 2011). News media is very active in India as there are more than 100000 publishers registered with the Registrar of India and have the second-highest selling newspapers in the world1. The recent trend now in India is shifting towards the online world as people are showing interest in the e-papers and also on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. (Sahni and Sharma, 2020). The public health issue is among one of the most prominent topics discussed these days as we know that Indian Health care has a very contradicting landscape (Kasthuri, 2018). On one end people are served with high-tech medical facilities especially in urban areas but the scenario is different in the remote areas where people are not able to get full medical facilities as worsened conditions of the health care centers (Kasthuri, 2018). There are mainly four main problems that contribute to the worst-case scenario that can be presented in four A’s which are lack of Awareness, Access, Affordability, and Absence (Kasthuri, 2018). Mass media plays a very crucial role in spreading health information among people (Liu and Lo, 2014). The awareness is spread through newspapers by publishing numerous articles on hygiene, immunization, population control, mental health, and various deadly pandemic like the H1N1 pandemic (Kasthuri, 2018).
The world is going through a deadly pandemic known as Coronavirus (Covid-19) which is one of the worst global health crises faced by the human race since World War II (Wang et al., 2020). Coronavirus causes an acute respiratory illness that was first observed in the city of Wuhan, China in December 2019 and gradually it spread across the globe (Kong et al., 2020). The pandemic has been severely affecting India as it has the second most active number of cases2. India has a total of more than eleven million active cases and more than 1.5 lakh people have lost their lives3. The whole nation was under lockdown in four stages named Phase 1 (March 25- April 14), Phase 2 (April 15- May 3), Phase 3 (May 4- May 17), and Phase 4 (May 18- May 31). Eventually, in June the government announced to give relief in lockdown to put the country’s economy back on track. The stages of giving relief were named Unlock1 (June 1- June 30), Unlock 2 (July 1- July 31), and Unlock 3 (Aug 1- Aug 31)4. After the unlock procedure started India experienced a steep rise in the Covid-19 cases. During the lockdown period, people have started using online platforms such as e-papers, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) to keep them aware of happenings in India.
The changing scenario around the world due to the pandemic our study enlightens the change in health issues coverage during the pre-and peri- Covid-19 period in India printed on the e-paper’s front page. The front page of the newspaper is of utmost importance and carries very crucial news about the important events occurring around the world (Kim and Chung, 2017). So, a total of 6347 news articles are scrapped from the front pages of best-selling newspapers in India namely “The Times of India” and “The Hindustan Times” 5 using the data scrapper tool from July 2019 to June 2020. From July 2019 to December 2019 is considered a pre-Covid-19 period as there were no coronavirus active cases at that time and January 2020 onwards is considered as peri-coronavirus period as the active cases started emerging in January in India. According to statistics, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times are mostly read English newspapers in India6. Further, our study deals with analyzing the change in the sentiments aroused from news articles through sentiment analysis. The sentiment analysis is performed as the comprehension of the message by newspapers affects the attitude of the people (Wyver and Shrum, 2015). Our study findings will help Government officials, researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders to better understand the prevalence and spreading of Coronavirus disease in India. Moreover, Government officials can initiate the formulation of post-event policies to strengthen the health sector of the country to fight for any future epidemic outbreak.