During the past week, mainstream coverage of schools and COVID-19 continued to fall.
Based on a search of Media Cloud’s database of top news outlets, the number of mainstream news media stories about schools and COVID-19 declined for the third week in a row last week.
On Friday, April 10, just 202 mainstream stories appeared about schools and COVID-19, the lowest weekday number of such stories since March 6, when 198 stories appeared.
You can see the results here.
Above: Mainstream coverage of the impact of the pandemic on schools (blue bar) has continued to fall.
The drop-off over the past three weeks has been steady.
The 1,512 school-related COVID-19 stories that were published from April 5 to April 11 were 59 percent lower than the 3,698 stories about schools and COVID-19 that ran during the peak week of March 15-21.
Above: School-related stories about the COVID-19 pandemic (blue line) have decreased as a percentage of all COVID-19 coverage, though the decrease has been moderate over the past two weeks.
Stories about the effects of the pandemic on schools are falling not only in number but also as a percentage of all stories about COVID-19.
The week of March 8-14, 14.5 percent of all COVID-19 stories in mainstream media included a mention of schools — nearly the same percentage as stories that week that mentioned economic factors.
But since then, the percentage of COVID-19 stories about schools has dropped by more than half, to 6.7 percent of stories, while the share of COVID-19 stories about the economy has increased to 18.9 percent.
Previous coverage:
School-related COVID-19 coverage fell again last week — we think
How mainstream COVID-19 schools coverage surged — then fell
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The Grade
Launched in 2015, The Grade is a journalist-run effort to encourage high-quality coverage of K-12 education issues.
