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Introducción: Los medios de comunicación tradicionales están desempeñando en España un papel destacado en la cobertura informativa de la COVID-19. Objetivo: Estudiar las representaciones del virión del SARSCovid-2 en los informativos de televisión y prensa, las motivaciones que subyacen en su diseño y su relación con las imágenes científicas del mismo. Metodología: Se ha utilizado una metodología mixta cualitativa-cuantitativa con entrevistas a expertos y análisis mediante el estadístico Chi-cuadrado de sendas muestras de 1.732 noticias, extraídas de la versión impresa de 19 diarios españoles, y de 121 representaciones del virión en 37 programas informativos de televisión. Resultados: Un 36,02% de las imágenes de la prensa en papel son ilustraciones científicas, mientras que en los informativos de TV sólo un 11,57%. Conclusiones: Se demuestra que la prensa ha sido más fiel a las imágenes científicas que los informativos televisivos. Las principales cadenas utilizan en sus informativos ilustraciones en 3D del virión donde frecuentemente destacan espículas alargadas terminadas en tentáculos, lo que responde a una motivación estética y de atraer la atención del espectador.

The media have played a leading role on Covid-19 news coverage in Spain. After the first cases were detected, they were forced to urgently develop graphic representations of the SARS-CoV-2 virion in order to talk about an invisible and unknown enemy. This study starts from the analysis of these early media representations to determine how they have contributed to the visual imagery of the virus in the Spanish population during the first wave. For this, a valid sample of 369 SARS-CoV-2 virion drawings made by adults during June and July 2020 was analysed and compared with the graphic representations offered by television news and print media between January and April 2020 in Spain and also with the main SARS-CoV-2 images released by the scientific community. The study concludes that the predominant imagery is closer to the representative patterns offered by television news, despite being a less scientific representation of the virus than the offered by the newspapers. Likewise, the representational patterns present two specificities to be highlighted: peplomers with a sharp ending giving aggressiveness to the virion and expressive facial features which are characteristic of humanisation or animalisation in the representation of the virion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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