The emergence and rapid proliferation of Covid-19 made the implementation of the 6th Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) the most extraordinary since the initiative’s inception in 1995. Yet, despite the pandemic, the media sample was the highest ever. The research was implemented by 116 teams and covered 30,172 stories published in newspapers, broadcast on radio and television, and disseminated on news websites and via news media tweets.

Twenty-five per cent of stories in the sample carried a coro- navirus sub- or principal theme. A tweak in the methodology still made it possible to analyze the stories along the classic GMMP major topic categories of politics & government, economy, science & health, social & legal, crime & violence and celebrity/media/arts & sports. The GMMP 2020 topics’ structure carved out a seventh major topic “gender & relat- ed”, in which to cluster stories specific to sexual harassment, rape, #MeToo and similar gender-specific news.