The Framing of COVID-19 in Italian Media and Its Relationship with Community Mobility: A Mixed-Method Approach.

Media framing of epidemics was found to influence public perceptions and behaviors in experiments, yet no research has been conducted on real-world behaviors during public health crises. We examined the relationship between Italian news media coverage of COVID-19 and compliance with stay-at-home orders, which could impact the spread of epidemics. We used a computational method for framing analysis (ANTMN) and combined it with Google's Community Mobility data. A time-series analysis using vector autoregressive models showed that the Italian media used media frames that were largely congruent with ones used by journalists in other countries: A focusing on symptoms and health effects, a focusing on attempts to ameliorate risks, and a , focusing on political and social impact. The prominence of different media frames over time was associated with changes in Italians' mobility patterns. Specifically, we found that the was associated with increased mobility, whereas the was associated with decreased mobility. The results demonstrate that the ways the news media discuss epidemics can influence changes in community mobility, above and beyond the effect of the number of deaths per day.