‘Satiricalization’ of A Pandemic: An Exploration of WHO’s Public Health Taxonomy for Social Listening in Covid-19 Caricatures in Kenyan Newspapers

Abstract

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic in Kenya in the year 2020 triggered a massive infodemic campaigns by the Kenyan government to raise public awareness about the disease. There was an overabundance of information globally about Covid-19 and the risk of misinformation and disinformation was very high. Although the masses were craving for news about the disease it was not easy to identify the trustworthy sources and reliable health guidance. This information confusion undermined the efforts to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Recognizing the power of mass media contents in shaping public opinion, this article examined the use of the caricature as a platform of communication. It specifically analyzed how the Kenyan newspapers’ used caricatures and satirical techniques to deploy the World Health Organization’s Health Taxonomy for Social Listening frames in their Covid-19 messages. It uses the coinage satiricalization to emphasize the extent to which the caricatures deployed humour, mockery and infotainments to deliver their messages. To interpret and make sense of the caricatures’ messages, multimodal critical discourse analysis and content analysis were deployed. 261 caricatures were evaluated. The Key finding was that the three newspapers of Nation, Standard and the Star deployed caricatures as potent tools for communication and that, the WHO’s taxonomy of health messaging is a strategic asset that is used by cartoonists in their framing of health messages. It is recommended that, print media outlets in Kenya should continue using caricatures in their priming of key issues that affects the society.