1. Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic grabbed the attention of all digital news media, as it matches almost all newsworthy criteria [
1,
2]. The unpredictability and serious consequences of the spread of the virus led to a considerable increase in the consumption of news [
3], which became an essential tool for knowing how to act in the face of the emergency [
4]. Media are the most widely used source of scientific information and, on many occasions, the only source of information on science-related topics for the general population [
5].
During the COVID-19 pandemic, information consumption on the Internet increased dramatically. In Europe, for example, consumption peaks were recorded on the dates when the first governmental measures were taken to curb the spread of the virus [
6]. Despite this, research conducted after the pandemic showed that much of the information circulating on the web lacked scientific rigor [
7]. Some revealed that information about COVID-19 was often fuelled by infodemic monikers such as “coronavirus lab” or “5G coronavirus” [
8], promoting misinterpretations, misleading information and false news [
9].
Health professionals have always faced misinformation, as it has existed since awareness of the media’s influence on public opinion. However, both the digital era and the COVID-19 pandemic have evidenced a substantial growth of fake news or manipulated information. Both factors have made these contents gain even more strength, potentially posing a risk to public health [
10].
Such was the extent of misinformation generated around the disease, that it was described by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an “infodemic” and, given that misinformation on health issues can represent a threat to public health [
11], the agency asked researchers to help define and understand the scope of high-quality and low-quality information circulating on the Internet [
12].
The media has a relevant role in emergency situations, as citizens trust them to provide truthful and evidence-based information [
13]. Furthermore, people trust that they do so without causing panic in society [
14] and have a commitment to correcting misinformation by filtering content and making available information of proven quality [
15].
Likewise, the media is a powerful tool for shaping the public agenda, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple recent investigations have shown its impact on the public perception of the virus. Some of them reveal that the media played an essential role in slowing the spread of the disease [
16,
17] and others that they encouraged racial attacks by defining COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” [
18,
19]. This demonstrates the need to study media behaviour in situations that require the consumption of contrasted information by the public.
The citizenry tends to seek information that aligns with and sustains their beliefs and ways of understanding reality, seeking evidence that confirms their opinions by consuming information that is consistent with their views, even if it is biased. Previous studies argue that this in turn is intensified by dogmatisms and the difficulty of dealing with complexity, as well as by the tendencies of people with very conservative positions, who present greater resistance to revising their beliefs [
20,
21]. In the case of Catholic communities, where a wide range of forms can be found, we can detect areas that tend to dogma and conservatism, which is why they represent one of the many areas where disinformation can proliferate.
On their part, digital platforms and social media, through the use of algorithmic recommendations, show each person the information that may be of most interest to them [
22,
23,
24]. Thus, they intensify the tendency to search for information that reinforces everyone’s belief system, thereby enhancing the so-called bubble effect [
25]. Previous research has shown that on Twitter, for example, fake news spread faster and further than real news [
26,
27]. Fake news pushes some psychological buttons. A prominent feature of fake news headlines is emotional provocation, oriented to cause shock, fear, anger, and moral outrage [
21]. For this reason, we conducted in this study an analysis of the headlines of the publications made about the COVID-19 vaccine in Catholic media.
Some research, such as that developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [
28], points to the virilising potential of narratives containing disinformation in view of their strategically thought-out composition and shaped with content that summons affections such as fear and hate [
29], whose political potential ends up forging an uncritical receptivity on the part of the individuals who receive the disinformation.
Disinformation favours the monetisation and profitability of digital platforms, at the same time as it benefits their producers with audience and visibility beyond profitability, and thus, it ends up being a strategy of the business model of each platform which, as Zuboff [
30] tells us, work using models of action economy with strategies to attract the attention of users in order to extract behavioural capital; currently, in Zuboff’s opinion, this is the main capital of technological capitalism. However, it is worth underlining that platforms deny such a strategy and see disinformation as an unintended consequence of their business models.
The fact is that the power of misinformation to go viral on digital platforms is exploited to the fullest by antivaccine movements that use fake science as a template and guide for the narratives that reach their audiences. The US Center for Countering Digital Hate conducted extensive research and identified the earnings of the top twelve antivaccine figures in the US and concluded that the market for antivaccine communication and disinformation is highly lucrative [
31].
There is a high volume of misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines, which has been fuelled by conspiracy ideas such as the nonexistence of the virus, the idea that vaccines contain microchips to control the population, or the implementation of 5G [
10], and rumours about their safety for human health [
32]. Misleading news about vaccines circulates in digital media and social networks which may differ according to the religious community [
32]. In Catholic communities, it has been found (something to be studied in this article) that the vaccine is linked to the use of cells from aborted foetuses. Likewise, in Muslim communities, false claims have been observed regarding the use of traces of pork in vaccine development [
33], and in Hindu communities, similar claims have been observed but with the modification that the meat utilised was beef [
34]. Previous research indicates that misinformation and fake news present one of the main reasons why people are reluctant to receive vaccines [
11,
35].
3. Results
3.1. Origin of the Publications
Of the 968 posts retrieved by the algorithm, more than half came from English-language websites (62.2%). Almost a third were retrieved from Spanish websites (27.6%) and significantly fewer from Italian (5.6%), French (2.8%) and Portuguese (1.7%) websites. Of the 109 websites consulted, publications were retrieved from 58 websites. The sites from which the most publications were retrieved are
Crux (135 articles) and
ACN web (102). Almost half of the publications were retrieved from
Catholic News Agency (61),
American Magazine (53),
Catholic Philly (51),
National Catholic Register (51) and
Catholic Newspaper (51). Fewer than 50 publications were retrieved from the remaining websites (
Figure 1).
The publications were disseminated by sites from 17 countries. Four of the studied sites were classified as “Global” because they are based in more than one territory and are characterised by their international reach. This is the case of
Aciprensa,
Gaudium Press,
Catholic News Service and
Cisa News Africa. About half of the publications retrieved, and thus analysed, (48.7%) come from US websites. The remaining half is distributed among the rest of the territories detected, including the “Global” category (
Figure 2).
3.2. Support for Websites
Most of the publications correspond to media whose original support is the Internet (58%) (
Figure 3). This can be observed in the publications of all languages, except for French-language publications, where 74% of the publications correspond to media whose original support is the press. In the remaining languages, Internet media publications correspond to 54% of English publications, 57% of Spanish publications, 85% of Italian publications and 100% of Portuguese publications. The only language in which media whose original support is television was identified is English (7%) (
Figure 4).
3.3. Publication Date
Throughout the study period, peaks of information production on the COVID-19 vaccine can be observed. When analysing the total number of publications, two dates show the highest number of articles published on this topic, with English and Spanish websites producing the highest volumes of publications on these dates (
Figure 5).
This news spike responded to a statement issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, approved by Pope Francis, in which he announced: “All vaccines recognised as clinically safe and effective can be used in conscience with the certainty that the use of such vaccines does not constitute a formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in the production of the vaccines are derived”. The text stated that the reason is that the abortion from which the cell lines were extracted “is, on the part of those who make use of the resulting vaccines, remote”. However, the Congregation clarified that this thumbs-up does not equate to approval of abortion or the use of cell lines derived from aborted foetuses in scientific testing.
Among Spanish-language publications, several unrelated issues are identified, so the increase in news output is believed to be rather coincidental. In English publications, however, two recurring themes can be observed. One is the call by Europe’s Catholic leaders (Caritas Europa and the Commission of Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union) for the EU to be guided by solidarity, fraternity, and social justice in distributing and administering the COVID-19 vaccine. “Commitment and solidarity must be the decisive criterion at this historic moment,” they said in a joint statement. The other, meanwhile, was the prayer offered by Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory of Washington for those who had died of COVID-19 on CNN’s programme marking 500,000 deaths from the disease.
Three informative peaks can be observed in the Spanish publications:
Publications on this date are linked to the start of vaccination against COVID-19 in the United States, with a nurse in New York City being the first person to receive the vaccine. This event prompted a joint statement from the chairs of the Doctrine and Pro-Life Committees of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in which they argued that vaccination is “a moral responsibility”. Receiving one of the COVID-19 vaccines should be understood as an act of charity towards other members of our community. “In this way, being safely vaccinated against COVID-19 should be considered an act of love of neighbour and part of our moral responsibility for the common good,” wrote prelates Kevin C. Rhoades and Joseph F. Naumann, while not obviating the “moral concerns” of vaccines. The bishops of the state of Colorado also spoke out, stating in a letter that the use of vaccines is morally acceptable under certain circumstances. In this sense, they recalled that “a good end cannot justify bad means” and that vaccines “must be developed according to ethical criteria”. The Canadian government warned that those allergic to any ingredient should not use the Pfizer vaccine. Another event that was identified in the publications on this date was the demonstration of some twenty COVID-19 denialists around Seville Cathedral. “The mask makes us sick”, “COVID-19 vaccine = genetic engineering” and “The vaccine kills you” were some of the messages of the demonstrators.
Postings on this date relate to the Vatican’s declaration that it is morally acceptable to vaccinate against COVID-19. 55% of the publications on this date report the content of the Vatican’s statement with headlines that refer to the vaccine in a positive or neutral way, such as “Holy See calls COVID-19 vaccines “morally acceptable””, or “Moral assessment of the use of COVID-19 vaccines”. The remaining 45% tend towards the negative tone and criticism of this note issued by the Vatican, either with headlines such as “Christians should never take vaccine contaminated by abortions, says bishop” or “Vatican applies vaccine contaminated by abortions”. You can also find headlines on this date where no reference was made to the fact of the note issued by the Vatican, but in which the vaccine was associated with negative side effects and even death from the vaccine.
On this date, although a peak of publications can be observed, they are not related to each other. Nor has it been possible to find an informative event or fact that justifies the increase in publications on this date, so it could be considered a chance occurrence, with no identified causality.
In the English-language publications, a greater number of information peaks about the COVID-19 vaccine are identified, which coincide with the following dates:
Growth in publication volume is recorded due to Catholic websites reporting that a Vatican spokesperson confirmed that Popes Francis and Benedict XVI received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on the previous Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.
Most publications on this date report a decree issued by the Cardinal Governor of Vatican City State warning that employees who refuse to receive the COVID-19 vaccine could face sanctions or dismissal.
On this day, the chairman of the US bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, released a video in which he said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “can be used with a good moral conscience”. The bishop said the Vatican “has made it clear that all COVID-19 vaccines recognised as clinically safe and effective can be used in good conscience”. He also said that if there is a choice of vaccines available, “we recommend that you choose one with the least connection to abortion-derived cell lines”.
On this date, a group of leading Catholic academics announced that they believed it was morally acceptable for anyone to receive any of the vaccines available in the United States. “Catholics, and indeed all people of good will who embrace a culture of life for the whole human family, born and unborn, can use these vaccines without fear of moral culpability” for abortion, they said. The variation in the news output of the Portuguese, French and Italian websites is not significant, as in no cases are their peak days more than three publications. Therefore, no correlations with specific current events were established.
5. Discussion
The results of the conducted research reveal that disinformation also reached the Catholic community through its own communication vehicles, and considering the five languages analysed, highlight the complexity of the phenomenon in the midst of the pandemic process and the potential health risks for this population. Disinformation in this context goes beyond a market that runs through digital platforms and social networks and is established within Catholic journalistic platforms, where the ethics and aesthetics of journalism are in line with Catholicism, emphasizing aspects of personal and collective belief in an environment marked by the undeniable word of God. In this research, comparisons were made by language, considering those mostly spoken by catholic communities, but not by country or region. However, this may also bring interesting results to compare with the present study, and thus is a suggested line for future research.
Moreover, the results of this study are consistent with previous research that has shown that the COVID-19 pandemic, like any pandemic [
1], has become a global phenomenon that has captured the attention of digital media around the world [
2,
4]. The algorithm created for this research scrapped 109 Catholic media outlets in five different languages: Spanish, English, French, Portuguese and Italian. In total, it collected 968 publications from 58 websites. More than half of the publications retrieved by the algorithm and, therefore, analysed in this research, came from websites in English (62%) and a little less than a third (28%) from websites in Spanish. Fewer publications were from Italian (6%), French (3%) and Portuguese (2%) websites. The sites from which the largest number of publications were retrieved are
Crux (135) and
ACN web (102). In addition, noteworthy numbers of the publications were analysed from
Catholic News Agency (61),
American Magazine (53),
Catholic Philly (51),
National Catholic Register (51) and
Diario Católico (51). Less than 50 publications were recovered and analysed from the rest of the websites covered in this research. Moreover, almost half of the publications analysed (49%) come from U.S. websites (
Figure 2). These results suggest a higher attention given by the mentioned Catholic media outlets and languages to the vaccine topic. However, this may also be because the algorithm was more successful in retrieving vaccine-related content from some media than from others and, as a result, collected a greater number of publications from those media. Therefore, the results should be interpreted with caution.
The results show peaks of informative production on COVID-19 vaccines (
Figure 5). These peaks are registered in the Spanish and English publications, as the variation in the information production of the Portuguese, French and Italian websites was not significant since it did not exceed three daily publications on the days of highest production. All the peaks identified coincide with events linked to COVID-19 vaccines that can be considered relevant to the Catholic community.
Regarding the journalistic genre, the most frequently used was the informative genre, accounting for 90% of the publications, compared with 10% opinion publications. The language in which the opinion genre obtained the highest percentage was Italian, with 14% of publications, followed by Portuguese publications, that reached 13% of this type of publications. Likewise, in all languages, informative publications accounted for more than 85% (
Figure 6); French was the language with the highest percentage of informational publications (93%), followed by Spanish informative publications with 91%, and English with 90% informative publications.
Among the publications of the informative genre, we find that the majority are news (83%). In second place comes the report (10%) and then, to a much lesser extent, the chronicle (4%) and the interview (3%). Reports and chronicles were only identified among publications in Spanish and English, while publications in Portuguese were only news.
Most of the headlines among informative publications were referential (93%), meaning that they intended to be objective, and they are true or not false. A minor percentage of informative headlines (7%) were of an evaluative type (valuative), which embody an interpretative order insofar as they reflect an interpretation of the journalist or author of the publication in accordance with his or her values, interests, or ideology. French-language publications used the greatest number of valuative headlines (24%) (
Figure 8).
Within the opinion publications, 81% were columns, i.e., signed journalistic texts that offered a point of view or disquisition on a particular topic. Columns prevailed as the majority of the opinion publications, with at least an 80% in all the studied languages, and in the cases of Portuguese and French, the opinion genre represented 100% of the publications (
Figure 9). The second most used format, with 17%, was the editorial, namely, unsigned publications that express the opinions of the media outlet itself, which do not contain personal positions, but those of the intellectual collective behind the website’s publication. This format, however, was only identified in opinion publications in Spanish and English. To a much lesser extent, opinion publications appeared in the format of a reader’s letter (2%).
Most of the opinion headlines were of a valuative nature; a total of 61% of the headlines of publications of this type included an interpretation, evaluation, or judgment by the journalist with respect to certain facts of reference. Thus, less than 40% of opinion headlines were thematic, indicating only the issue addressed in the publication. When dividing per language, this trend can also be observed among Spanish and English publications (64–36% and 59–41%, respectively). On their hand, Portuguese and French publications presented a 50–50 distribution of thematic and valuative headlines, whereas Italian presented 75% valuative headlines in contraposition to 25% of the thematic type. It is interesting to note how the Italian language presents some differences with regards to the rest of the languages. On the one hand, it had the highest percentage of opinion publications (14%), and within opinion publications, it had the highest percentage of evaluative headlines (75%). This result could suggest a more explicit tendency from the Italian Catholic media to present their opinions when referring to the COVID-19 vaccine, while the media analysed in English or Spanish, for example, showed a greater tendency towards communicating vaccine-related issues in a format that seeks to present (or pretend) neutrality and information, even when false information is given, as in the case of linking the vaccine to abortion. In any case, even counting Italian publications, the majority of publications in all languages tended to be presented in an informative format, representing more than 80% across all languages. Moreover, within the informative publications, the vast majority were of the news type and had referential headlines; therefore, the tendency of all the Catholic media analysed is to present information on the COVID-19 vaccine with facts in a neutral referential news format.
Another result that is worth highlighting is the fact that within the informative publications, French publications presented 24% evaluative headlines. The language that used the most headlines of this type after French was Spanish with 7%, which shows a difference between French and the rest of the languages. Sixty-one percent of the evaluative headlines had a negative connotation. However, this majority is not observed in all languages. The language division shows how this majority is observed in French and Italian evaluative headlines, in 100% of the cases, and in the Spanish evaluative headlines, in 87% of the cases. However, in evaluative headlines in English, 57% of the headlines contained a positive connotation, and in the case of the evaluative headlines of the opinion publications in Portuguese, 100% were positive (
Figure 11).
When analysing the profiles of the authors of the opinion publications, it can be observed how the majority have a journalistic profile, with a 34% of authors belonging to the media sector. A mixed profile represents 28% of opinion publications’ authors, 17% of these publications were written by authors with a religious profile, and 13% of the profiles belong to experts in different disciplines. The present study did not analyse whether author profiles had any correlation with the tone, stance or persuasiveness of opinion publications, nor the impact of each author on the recognition of his or her publications, an interesting line of research to explore in the future.
Access to COVID-19 vaccines and the capacity to provide the vaccine was the subject of most of the publications of all types. The second most frequent subject was the misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccines, and the third, the composition of the vaccines (
Figure 13). Regarding such composition, a link between the COVID-19 vaccine and abortion was detected in more than a third of the 968 analysed publications. In the same way previous research had found misleading news about vaccines circulating through the digital sphere among different religious communities [
32], in the present investigation it was found that 31% of the publications suggested that the COVID-19 vaccines either contained cells from aborted foetuses or caused spontaneous abortions. The language in which this linkage occurred to the greatest extent was English, where 38% of the publications presented this linkage. In second place were the publications in Spanish, with 26% of the publications (
Figure 14). In line with previous research that demonstrated that there is a high volume of misinformation regarding vaccines for COVID-19 and conspiracies and mistrust about their health safety [
10,
32], the present research has found misinformation linking the vaccine to the use of cells from aborted foetuses and/or causing miscarriages.
With regards to the sources of the publications, the type of source most frequently cited corresponds to health personnel and experts in health sciences. In the second place, we see sources coming from the religious sphere. Among the publications that communicated about vaccine composition, one-fifth contained only religious sources, and in 76% of these cases, some of the sources were religious even if they included other types of sources. Four percent of the publications on this topic used health personnel and health science experts as their only source, and 58% of these publications used at least one such source (
Table 5). Likewise, within the publications that informed about vaccine information/disinformation, 13% had religious people as their only source and 2% had only health care personnel and experts as sources, but 61% of them used at least one source of this type. Equally, in 61% of these publications, we found at least one religious source (
Table 6).
In conclusion, the tendency among the Catholic media analysed was to present the information related to the COVID-19 vaccine in an informative, newsworthy format with referential headlines, using health and religious sources. Likewise, the topic that most occupied the analysed publications was access to the vaccine and the ethics or morality of getting vaccinated. This study focused on the news production from Catholic media, which opens a clear future research venue with focus on the consumption of these media and the influence of their formats on readers’ attitudes, as well as the role that different formats play in shaping their perceptions and beliefs. Overall, this research opens a deeper reflection on what happens when journalism and religion meet, the former being a field in which professionals are expected to convey facts based on evidence and research [
13,
14,
15].