This chapter explores cultural interpretations of care by examining five years (2018-2022) of content published in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Over the last five years, as the United States faced COVID-19, people sought guidance regarding the pandemic itself as well as government decisions and socio-economic impacts by reading articles and letters published in these papers. The research looks at news coverage on the concept of care two years prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, during the height of the pandemic, and two years post-pandemic, and the authors analyze how these newspapers framed care across that time period. Through this content analysis, they identified four themes: breakdowns and breakthroughs, currency concerns, compassionate care, and heroes and villains. An exploration of these themes highlights when care is discussed by these news outlets and how, when analyses of particular forms of care are set aside, and how the news media serves as a central player in structuring understandings of care.
TopArticulations Of Care
Cultural interpretations of care provide a lens through which the public’s view of direct and appropriate caring is framed, discussed, and applied. As guideposts are provided for what are appropriate forms of care, attempts are also made to establish what being “non-caring” entails. Central cultural interpreters today, even in the midst of the rise of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, are the traditional news media. The contents of national print news media sources, while certainly not the only purveyors of understanding, have been analyzed as significant identifiers of the boundaries associated with cultural signs and symbols, and are key players when attempting to sense the political landscape around dynamics within the society (Berelson, 1971; Famulari, 2020; Krippendorff, 1980; Pinnuck, 2014; Ritter, 2020; Xu, 2013; Zhang, 2018). In this chapter we will explore how these leading interpreters of concepts and applications of care present frames of care and caregiving to the public. Through a content analysis of news articles on care published in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal we will critique the contemporary symbols and meaning systems that serve as central guides for particular publics.
The current study examines five years (2019-2023) of content in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The COVID-19 pandemic was at its height in 2020. We examined the pandemic year as well as two years before and two after 2020. Certainly, news reporting during the pandemic was rife with discussions of who received what kind of care, the way in which essential workers found themselves providing care, and the breakdown of necessary, direct, care for many in society. Significant news delivery focused on the number ill and hospitalized, and the high number of deaths in the United States and around the world from COVID-19. In addition, the stories focused on how to protect oneself from the virus (i.e., masking, washing all groceries, isolating), and, at points, the discussion turned to “fake news” and the consequences of incorrectly understood care. Included in these news reports were ongoing discussions of whether requiring vaccinations was an overreach in terms of governmental approaches to care. Finally, and significantly for our discussion in this chapter, were the conversations about essential workers, the challenges of child care during the pandemic, and the impact of social isolation. These stories, while fewer in number than those directly addressing the ongoing health crisis, shed some additional light on deep-seated fractures in the social care fabric of society.