Covid-19 in the Mass Media Through the Lens of South African Editorial Cartoons: An Exploratory Study

ABSTRACTThis study explored the main themes present in South African editorial cartoons related to Covid-19 published in 2020 to examine how they portrayed the societal discourse around the pandemic. Our data set of 1196 single-frame editorial cartoons, created by 19 cartoonists in three languages and published in 24 publications over the course of 2020, shows that Covid-19 was a pertinent topic for South African cartoonists. Thematically, "politics and government" dominated as broad themes, while other pertinent themes were "society and social consequences", "economic impacts" and "health". Politics and politicians were prominent, but science and scientists were represented only rarely. In terms of tone, the cartoons were predominantly negative, with fear as a frequently used emotional appeal. Very few cartoons contained educational messages, but most did depict the virus and face masks, which could have heightened public awareness about health-related issues. We conclude that editorial cartoons added to the media coverage of the pandemic, often adding to general media discourses of fear and anxiety, and therefore it is likely that these cartoons influenced public sentiment. Furthermore, through their focus on politicians, these cartoons added to the politicisation of the pandemic, but made only a minor contribution to public education and the combating of misinformation.KEYWORDS: Editorial cartoonsCovid-19politicisation of Covid-19Covid-19 cartoonsCovid-19 media coveragescience communicationSouth Africanewspapers AcknowledgementsThe authors wish to thank Fadiyah Rabin and Marnell Kirsten for their assistance with coding, Alicia Nortjé-Da Conceicao for her assistance with statistical analysis, and Musawenkosi Ndlovu for translations of isiZulu cartoons. In addition, we thank Marnell Kirsten and Karien Connoway for their inputs on the draft manuscript. We are also grateful to the talented South African cartoonists for allowing us to reproduce their work.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 An imbongi (plural: iimbongi) is a member of the Xhosa community (an indigenous population group in South Africa) who performs ceremonial activities at important events, such as reciting poetry, singing, re-telling events and commenting on current affairs.Additional informationFundingThis work is based on research supported by the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number BC01/2019/10]; as well as support from the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University.