Abstract

The first lockdown had a positive impact on alcohol consumption, with wine becoming the most commonly consumed alcoholic beverage. Although the belief that the immune system and viral resistance are boosted by alcohol was labelled as ‘myth’ by the World Health Organization, a later study gave evidence that red wine drinking provided protection from COVID-19 1. Based on these premises, this paper embraces a multi-disciplinary approach combining sentiment and corpus-assisted discourse analysis to explore news readers’ reactions to the news story as divulgated by the Daily Mail in a corpus of 454 online comments. Findings indicate that sarcasm and distrust are the most frequent feelings, along with a mainly negative sentiment associated with discourses concerning politics, the effectiveness of various substances in combating the virus and wine-making traditions. Also, insights into the role of readers’ role in affecting editorial policies are drawn.

Alba-Juez, Laura, and Salvatore Attardo. 2014. "The Evaluative Palette of Verbal Irony". Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, edited by Geoff Thompson and Laura Alba-Juez, 242: 93-116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.242.05alb

Aljazeera. 2020. Iran: Over 700 Dead after Drinking Alcohol to Cure Coronavirus. Last modified April 27. [25/05/2023].

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/27/iran-over-700-dead-after-drinking-alcohol-to-cure-coronavirus

Balahur, Alexandra, Ralf Steinberger, Mijail Kabadjov, Vanni Zavarella, Erik van der Goot, Matina Halkia, Bruno Pouliquen, and Jenya Belyaeva. 2013. "Sentiment Analysis in the News". ArXiv 1309.6202. doi: https://doi.org/­10.48550/ARXIV.1309.6202.

Bouazizi, Mondher, and Tomoaki Ohtsuki. 2016. "Sentiment Analysis in Twitter: From Classification to Quantification of Sentiments within Tweets". In 2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM). Washington (DC): IEEE.

https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOCOM.2016.7842262

Brezina, Vaclav, Pierre Weill-Tessier, and Anthony McEnery. 2021. #LancsBox (Version 6.0) [Software Package].

Cassar, Mario L., Albert Caruana, and Jirka Konietzny. 2020. "Wine and Satisfaction with Fine Dining Restaurants: An Analysis of Tourist Experiences from User Generated Content on TripAdvisor". Journal of Wine Research 31 (2): 85-100.

https://doi.org/10.1080/09571264.2020.1764919

Cavallo, Carla, Giovanna Sacchi, and Valentina Carfora. 2020. "Resilience Effects in Food Consumption Behaviour at the Time of Covid-19: Perspectives from Italy". Heliyon 6 (12): e05676.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e05676

Chong, Dennis, and James N. Druckman. 2007. "Framing Theory". Annual Review of Political Science 10 (1): 103-126.

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.072805.103054

Corbett, Jacqueline, and Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu. 2022. "From Tweets to Insights: A Social Media Analysis of the Emotion Discourse of Sustainable Energy in the United States". Energy Research & Social Science 89 (July): 102515.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2022.102515

Crerar, Pippa. 2021. "EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson 'broke Covid lockdown rules' with Downing Street Parties at Xmas". Mirror. Last modified December 1. [27/09/2023].

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-broke-covidlockdown-%2025585238

Cuomo, Maria Teresa, Debora Tortora, Giuseppe Festa, Alex Giordano, and Gerardino Metallo. 2016. "Exploring Consumer Insights in Wine Marketing: An Ethnographic Research on #Winelovers". Psychology & Marketing 33 (12): 1082-90.

https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.20942

Dai, Xi-jian, Liang Tan, Lina Ren, Yuan Shao, Weiqun Tao, and Yongjun Wang. 2022. "COVID-19 Risk Appears to Vary across Different Alcoholic Beverages". Frontiers in Nutrition 8 (January): 772700.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2021.772700

Demossier, Marion. 2010. "Consuming Wine in France the 'Wandering' Drinker and the 'Vin-anomie'". Dans Dictionnaire d'Histoire Culturelle de la France Contemporaine, édité par Christian Delporte, Jean Yves Mollier, et Jean Francois Sirinelli. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 842-844. [24/05/2023].

https://purehost.bath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/9434644/revisedarticle3_1.pdf.

Dubois, Magalie, Lara Agnoli, Jean-Marie Cardebat, Raúl Compés, Benoit Faye, Bernd Frick, Davide Gaeta, Eric Giraud-Héraud, Eric Le Fur, Florine Livat, Giulio Malorgio, Philippe Masset, Giulia Meloni, Vicente Pinilla, João Rebelo, Luca Rossetto, Günter Schamel, and Katrin Simon-Elorz. 2021. "Did Wine Consumption Change during the COVID-19 Lockdown in France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal?". Journal of Wine Economics 16 (2): 131-168.

https://doi.org/10.1017/jwe.2021.19

Ducharme, Jamie. 2020. "World Health Organization Declares COVID-19 a 'Pandemic'. Here's What That Means". Time Magazine. Last modified March 11. [03/05/2023].

https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaration

Fan, Xiude, Zhengwen Liu, Kyle L. Poulsen, Xiaoqin Wu, Tatsunori Miyata, Srinivasan Dasarathy, Daniel M. Rotroff, and Laura E. Nagy. 2021. "Alcohol Consumption is Associated with Poor Prognosis in Obese Patients with COVID-19: A Mendelian Randomization Study using UK Biobank". Nutrients 13: 1592.

https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13051592

Herring, Susan C. 2013. "Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent". Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, edited by Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester, 1-25. Washington (DC): Georgetown University Press.

Huang, Bo-Huei, Elif Inan-Eroglu, Ramon Z. Shaban, Mark Hamer, Annie Britton, and Emmanuel Stamatakisa. 2022. "Alcohol Intake and Mortality Risk of COVID-19, Pneumonia, and Other Infectious Diseases: An Analysis of 437191 UK Biobank Participants". Preventive Medicine Reports 26 (2022): 101751.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmedr.2022.101751

Hutto, J. Clayton, and Eric Gilbert. 2014. "VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-Based Model for Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 8 (1): 216-225.

https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14550

Khosravinik, Majid, and Nadia Sarkhoh. 2017. "Arabism and Anti-Persian Sentiments on Participatory Web Platforms: A Social Media Critical Discourse Study". International Journal of Communication 11: 3614-3633.

Kim, Soo-Min, and Eduard Hovy. 2004. "Determining the Sentiment of Opinions". In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics - COLING '04, 1367-es. Genève: Association for Computational Linguistics.

https://doi.org/10.3115/1220355.1220555

Kumar, H.M. Keerthi, and B.S. Harish. 2018. "Sarcasm Classification: A Novel Approach by Using Content Based Feature Selection Method". Procedia Computer Science 143: 378-386.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.409

Kurian, Jayan Chirayath. 2015. "Facebook Use by the Open Access Repository Users". Online Information Review 39 (7): 903-922.

https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-02-2015-0055

Manosevitch, Edith, and Dana Walker. 2009. "Reader Comments to Online Opinion Journalism: A Space of Public Deliberation". In 10th International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin (TX), April 17-18, 2009.

Marcoccia, Michel. 2004. "On-Line Polylogues: Conversation Structure and Participation Framework in Internet Newsgroups". Journal of Pragmatics 36 (1): 115-45.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(03)00038-9

Misra, Rishabh, and Prahal Arora. 2019. "Sarcasm Detection Using Hybrid Neural Network". ArXiv abs/1908.07414. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.­1908.­07414.

Napolitano, Antonella. 2018. "Image Repair or Self-Destruction? A Genre and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Restaurants' Responses to Online Complaints". Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (Special Issue) 10 (1): 135-153.

Page, Ruth, David Barton, Carmen Lee, Johann Wolfgang Unger, and Michele Zappavigna. 2022. Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003121763

Paleiron, Nicolas, Aurélie Mayet, Vanessa Marbac, Anne Perisse, Hélène Barazzutti, François-Xavier Brocq, Frédéric Janvier, Bertrand Dautzenberg, and Olivier Bylicki. 2021. "Impact of Tobacco Smoking on the Risk of COVID-19: A Large Scale Retrospective Cohort Study". Nicotine & Tobacco Research 23 (8): 1398-1404.

https://doi.org/10.1093/ntr/ntab004

Paltoglou, Georgios, and Mike Thelwall. 2013. "More Than Bag-of-Words: Sentence-based Document Representation for Sentiment Analysis". In Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Hissar (Bulgaria), September 7-13, 2013, 546-552. [24/05/2023].

https://aclanthology.org/R13-1072.pdf

Partington, Alan. 2009. "Evaluating Evaluation and Some Concluding Reflections on CADS". In Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War, edited by John Morley and Pauk Bayley, 261-303. London: Routledge.

Partington, Alan, ed. 2013. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 55).

https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.55

Rothkopf, David J. 2003. "When the Buzz Bites Back". The Washington Post. Last modified May 11. [21/05/2023].

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/05/11/when-the-buzz-bites-back/bc8cd84f-cab6-4648-bf58-0277261af6cd/

Ruelens, Anna. 2022. "Analyzing User-Generated Content Using Natural Language Processing: A Case Study of Public Satisfaction with Healthcare Systems". Journal of Computational Social Science 5 (1): 731-749.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-021-00148-2

Statista. 2023. "Wine Production in Selected Countries and Regions". Statista. Last modified April. [08/06/2023].

https://www.statista.com/statistics/240638/wine-production-in-selectedcountries-and-regions/

Taboada, Maite, Julian Brooke, Milan Tofiloski, Kimberly Voll, and Manfred Stede. 2011. "Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis". Computational Linguistics 37 (2): 267-307.

https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00049

Taylor, Charlotte. 2017. "The Relationship between Irony and Sarcasm: Insights from a First-Order Metalanguage Investigation". Journal of Politeness Research 13 (2): 209-241.

https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2015-0037

van Breemen, Richard B., Ruth N. Muchiri, Timothy A. Bates, Jules B. Weinstein, Hans C. Leier, Scotland Farley, and Fikadu G. Tafesse. 2022. "Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants". Journal of Natural Products 85 (1): 176-84.

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c00946

Velikova, Natalia, Oleksandra Hanchukova, and Bogdan Olevskyi. 2021. The Effect of Covid-19 on U.S. Wine Consumption: Six Months after the Original Lockdown. Texas Wine Marketing Research Institute. Research Report, May 14, 2021. [07/07/2023].

https://www.depts.ttu.edu/hs/texaswine/docs/COVID-19-Wine-Report.pdf.

Winstock, Adam R., Larissa J. Maier, Carmen Villa-Llera, Ahnjili Zhuparris, Emma Davis, Rachel Sutherland, Kim Kuypers, Cristopher Timmerman, Jason A. Ferris, and Monica J. Barratt. 2021. Global Drug Survey (Gds) 2021 Key Findings Report. [23/05/2023].

https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Report2021_global.pdf

World Health Organization. 2020. "Alcohol and COVID-19: What You Need to Know", 1-6. [03/06/2023].

https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/437608/Alcoholand-COVID-19-what-you-need-to-know.pdf

World Health Organization. 2022. "Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19): Tobacco". Last modified May 25. [27/09/2023].

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-tobacco

World Health Organization. n.d. "Tobacco and COVID-19". [27/09/2023].

https://www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19/tobacco-andcovid-19

Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2001. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.

https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857028020

Wouters, Claire. 2016. The Effect of Negative User-Generated Content on Consumer-Based Brand Equity: Comparing Brand Loyal versus Non-Loyal Customers in the Luxury Wine Market. University of Cape Town, Faculty of Commerce, School of Management Studies. [03/06/2023].

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20999

Zarocostas, John. 2020. "How to Fight an Infodemic". The Lancet 395 (10225): 676.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30461-X