  The purpose of this study is to analyse COVID-19 related news published
across different geographical places, in order to gain insights in reporting
differences. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major outbreak in January 2020 and was
followed by different preventive measures, lockdown, and finally by the process
of vaccination. To date, more comprehensive analysis of news related to
COVID-19 pandemic are missing, especially those which explain what aspects of
this pandemic are being reported by newspapers inserted in different economies
and belonging to different political alignments. Since LDA is often less
coherent when there are news articles published across the world about an event
and you look answers for specific queries. It is because of having semantically
different content. To address this challenge, we performed pooling of news
articles based on information retrieval using TF-IDF score in a data processing
step and topic modeling using LDA with combination of 1 to 6 ngrams. We used
VADER sentiment analyzer to analyze the differences in sentiments in news
articles reported across different geographical places. The novelty of this
study is to look at how COVID-19 pandemic was reported by the media, providing
a comparison among countries in different political and economic contexts. Our
findings suggest that the news reporting by newspapers with different political
alignment support the reported content. Also, economic issues reported by
newspapers depend on economy of the place where a newspaper resides.
