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Pregnancy is a universal experience shaped by sociocultural contexts. News media presents a unique opportunity to analyze public narratives of pregnancy and how it differs across cultures. Our study aims to (1) identify the most prevalent overall themes in news media narratives of pregnancy across 19 English-speaking countries, and (2) compare pregnancy narratives across geographic regions. We used the largest English news media corpus that included over 30 million news articles from more than 7000 news websites across 19 countries, and extracted a one-year data subset (2019; 1.5 billion words). Of the primary search terms 'pregnant' and 'pregnancy', we collated 240,464 descriptors that met criteria of lexical proximity and semantic bonding. Thereafter, we used topic modelling to identify the five most prevalent pregnancy-related themes: (1) complications and risk, (2) crime, (3) celebration, (4) celebrity births, and (5) contraception. Although there were regional differences, themes of complications and risk were most common, comprising 39.6% of all pregnancy narratives in our big-data corpus. The second-most dominant theme was crime (20.8%). Narratives of contraception were more prevalent in Europe, North America, and Oceania (27.2–31.3%) compared to Africa and Asia (11.9–19.6%). Though the vast majority of pregnancies are healthy, themes of complications and risk dominated the news media discourse; unchecked, this may be an avenue for misinformation, stress, and anxiety. In addition, lower prevalence of contraception narratives in Africa and Asia may reflect a gap that requires the attention of policymakers in building culturally-adapted programs to promote family planning and encourage open discussions about sexual health. Results contribute to the academic repository of societal representations of pregnancy through a big-data lens, providing contextual information for future development, implementation and evaluation of localized pregnancy-related campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Seldom in history does one get a 'front row seat'—with large-scale dynamic data—on how online news media narratives shift with a global pandemic. News media narratives matter because they shape societal perceptions and influence the core tent poles of our society, from the economy to elections. Given its importance—and with the benefit of hindsight—we provide a systematic framework to analyze news narratives of Covid-19, laying the groundwork to evaluate policy and risk communications. Objectives: We leverage a 10-billion-word-database of online news, taken from over 7,000 English newspapers and magazines across 20 countries, culminating in 28 million articles. First, we track the volume of Covid-19 conversations across 20 countries from before to during the pandemic (Oct'19 to May'20). Second, we distill the phases of global pandemic narratives, and elucidate regional differences. Methods: To track the volume of Covid-19 narratives, we identified 10 target terms—Coronavirus, Covid-19, Covid, nCoV, SARS-CoV-2, Wuhan Virus, Virus, Disease, Epidemic, Pandemic—and tracked their combined monthly prevalence across eight months from October 2019 through May 2020. Globally, across 20 countries, we identified 18,042,855 descriptors of the target terms. Further, these descriptors were analysed with natural language processing models to generate the top five topics of Covid-19 that were labelled by two independent researchers. This process was repeated across six continents to distil regional topics. Results: Our model found four phases of online news media narratives: Pre-pandemic, Early, Peak and Recovery. Pre-pandemic narratives (Oct'19–Dec'19) were divergent across regions with Africa focused on monkeypox, Asia on dengue fever, and North America on Lyme disease and AIDS. Early (Jan–Feb'20) and Peak Pandemic (Mar–May'20) evidenced a global convergence, reflecting the omnipresence of Covid-19. The brief transition from early to peak pandemic narratives underscored the pandemic's rapid spread. Emerging from the embers of the pandemic's peak were nascent recovery words that are regionally divergent—Oceania focused on hope and an uncertain future while North America centered on re-opening the economy and tackling discrimination. Conclusions: Practically, we presented a media barometer of Covid-19, and provided a framework to analyse the pandemic's impact on societal perceptions—laying the important groundwork for policy makers to evaluate policy communications, and design risk communication strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]