Abstract

Molefe MW*

If anything, COVID-19 has exposed the lust for power and colonial onslaught against Third World countries across the globe. While COVID-19 has had devastating effects across the globe, being one of the pandemics to imbue such high mortality rate on the human populace within the shortest period, it still presented an opportunity for the neoliberal inclines from the media to use public figures like queens, presidents, prime ministers to recreate mythical powers around vaccine jobs/injections for immunisation from COVID-19. The dominant global media and their remnants in the third world countries including South Africa (SA) were on a drive of injections or vaccine campaigns for purposes of profiteering multinational pharmaceuticals, through the mythical power associated with identified western leaders who were flighted across the world media taking vaccine jabs. Thus, dragging the unsuspecting populace across the globe into accepting, without question, their version of life-saving jabs. This paper seeks to track and qualitatively analyses selected editions (online) of the so-called liberal news (papers) in South Africa (SA) to understand how media headlines and the accompanying reports, using some leaders of the western countries including United States of America, created narratives to enact acceptance of immunity injections (COVID-19) such as Johnson & Johnson for COVID-19. These news reports that were published between 2019 to 2023 marked the height of COVID-19 cases in SA context, hence selected for this paper. The selected reports were analyzed by means of content analysis based on the theoretical underpinnings of Semiotics and Narrative theories. The study found that some news headlines and affiliated reporting of the selected online news (News24) created narratives that were sensationalistic, alarmist and episodic, without providing alternative information of mitigating the threats posed by the pandemic. Such narratives were event based and adopted a biomedical, Eurocentric-based vaccination approach to COVID-19, disguised through the presumed mythical power associated with selected leaders from the Global North.