Keyword – Covid-19

Polyák, Gábor – Nagy, Krisztina:

The constitutional framework for health communication

Covid-19 also triggered an ‘infodemic’ as the first pandemic of the social media era. Misinformation, disinformation and rumours threaten the management of the health crisis. After describing the infodemic phenomenon, this paper analyses the fundamental rights conflicts between the right to health, freedom of science, and freedom of expression.

Keywords: Covid-19, disinformation, freedom of science, freedom of opinion, infodemia, right to health

Szabó, Lilla Petronella – Béni, Alexandra:

Virus wars

The Covid-19 pandemic posed a new challenge to the media, which needed to inform citizens about novel concepts such as the spread of the coronavirus, staying at home, or social distancing. Our research focused on how leading Hungarian news sites (24.hu, index.hu, origo.hu) communicated the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures against it during the first and the second waves of the infections in Hungary. We identified the metaphors applied in the news articles by means of the discourse dynamics approach. Metaphors are important because they show the way speakers think about concepts through the analysis of language use. Therefore, metaphors reveal the conceptual frames applied by the online media to coronavirus and the measures against the virus. Our results showed that, in line with the international trend, war metaphors (which depicted the virus as an enemy, against whom one must fight) were dominant in the observed news articles. In addition to the war rhetoric, the spread of coronavirus appeared as a ‘flood,’ and Hungary was depicted as a ‘machine.’

Keywords: coronavirus, conceptual metaphor, discourse-based metaphor identification, Covid-19, flood metaphor, machine metaphor, news portal, war rhetoric

N. Varagya, Szilvia:

In crisis: communication! Is communication in crisis?

The Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, reached Slovakia before the campaign period of the parliamentary elections. The intensity of the pandemic coverage by the Hungarian-language daily newspaper Új Szó was influenced by several factors such as the election campaign topics, unexpected election results and other relevant events for the Hungarian enthnic comunity, the new government’s political priorities, scandals and pandemic control measures. The frequency of pandemic thematisation in the daily newspaper followed the curves of each Covid-19 wave in Slovakia. During the studied period, as a result of party-neutral journalism, the pandemic did not become a divisive political issue for Hungarians in Slovakia. The examined contents of Új Szó (editorials, opinion articles, caricatures, op-eds of the above mentioned newspaper) mostly relied on the linguistic and stylistic turns of Slovak political communication, its hidden messages, and the emerging ‘war rhetoric’ concerning the national testing.

Keywords: Covid-19, epidemic communication, media communication, New Word journal, pandemic, political communication, propaganda, public rhetoric, Slovakia, war rhetoric