Case Study of CNN in Crafting the Narrative About Vaccines in Relation to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID 19 pandemic has highlighted the necessity of accurately and simply relying scientific discovery and information to the public. Among scientists, the practice is to reduce jargon, engage the audience through storytelling, and include enough detail to give a broad understanding of a narrow topic. Conflict between journalists and scientists leads to a creation of a different narrative for the general public. The news site CNN.com was searched with the google archive function by year for articles that included the keyword vaccine. Articles were sorted into categories of main focus such as political, cultural and scientific or mixed. Results were analyzed and conclusions made about the amount of content in each category for the kind of narrative being written about vaccines, with most years having most articles in the political category. Possible effectiveness of mixed categories were discussed and areas future research identified.