In late 2019, the world started to face the challenge of preventing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, where an unprecedented amount of resources have been devoted to inventing and producing COVID-19 vaccines. However, health (mis)information obtained from new media and social media may contribute to vaccine hesitancy, which was identified as a significant threat to global health by WHO (Puri, Coomes, Haghbayan, & Gunaratne, 2020). Compared to these channels, mainstream media is still an essential tool for citizens to receive more reliable information. Accordingly, since vaccination is a controversial issue, how the Covid-19 vaccines were reported by mainstream media in different countries is worthy of being explored. Although many studies have investigated the news reporting of Covid-19 (e.g., Chen, Huang & Li, 2022; Marco-Franco, Pita-Barros, Vivas-Orts, González-de-Julián, & Vivas-Consuelo, 2021), much fewer studies have been discussed the news reporting of COVID-19 vaccines. Under this circumstance, this study focuses on news reports from reputable news organizations, i.e., People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) in China and The Guardian in the UK, themed on “COVID-19 Vaccines” during the period from 1^st December 2020, when national vaccination programs were launched by both countries, to 15^th September 2022. Drawing on the topic modeling method with LDA and framing analysis, this paper intends to explore the similarities and differences in frames on both media and the changes in the news frames in the past couple of years.

Firstly, 3,498 news reports from People’s Daily and 4,897 from The Guardian were found by using python. Secondly, LDA was adopted to examine the most appropriate number of topics. The parameter was eventually set to k = 4 because this value yielded the best balance of complexity and coherence of issues regarding the research objective. Both media were shown to be capable of being separated into three phases during LDA testing but with different split nodes. Finally, a total number of 254 news reports from People’s Daily and 268 from The Guardian were gained by using an every-other-day model to ensure the accuracy and consistency of data (Riffe, Aust & Lacy, 1993). The framework was obtained by combining the existing studies in the news frame (e.g., Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000; Luther & Zhou, 2005; Hong, 2007) with the topics and main keywords gained from LDA. Coding with the tool Nvivo, the data was distributed into three levels, encompassing the primary node (Public Health, Individual Interest, Economic Consequence, and Leadership), the secondary node (Infectiousness, Equality issues, Fake news, Vaccine, Policies, Impact, Vaccination, Contribution, Cooperation, and Influence), and the third-level node (Donation, Invention, and Safe and Efficacy). The results demonstrated that while both media, when using the public health framework, focused on reporting infectiousness issuesand policies. People’s Daily focused more on reporting other countries that had received donated Chinese vaccines and praised their value. In contrast, The Guardian reported additional content themed on equality issues in vaccination and fake news related. Besides, The Guardian used the individual interest framework significantly more than People’s Daily, which focused more on national and governmental level coverage. It is also interesting to note that People’s Daily, in the economic consequences frame, emphasized cooperation with other countries and the contribution of China’s epidemic prevention policy, vaccine donation, etc., whereas The Guardian was solely concerned with the influence of vaccine itself .

The news on the Covid-19 vaccines, in this case, obviously goes far beyond the public health issue itself, economic and political factors play essential roles in the news framing. People’s Daily, as a “mouthpiece” of the CCP, and the targeted audience is the global people, is tending to be used as a “strategic political propaganda” tool in the international communication field. Hence, its content must be in line with national policy, assisting China in constructing a good “national image” in the world and fostering discourse, transmission, and identity abroad, acting as a “symbol” that signifies the state’s presence. The Guardian, in contrast, is one of the most influential and popular news agencies in the UK, which belongs to the left-wing party (Vessey, 2005), standing for a liberal democrat newspaper. Thus, the content tends to be more diverse and liberal and has more democratic rights than People’s Daily.