Summary: | The media started the year 2020 with various conjectures about COVID-19 prophecies, as announced in films, novels and even the Bible. They did not even shy away from equating the consequences of the plague with the ones of COVID-19, triggering various racist and xenophobic slurs in readers’ comments. Through the aspect of intertextuality and intermediality, this paper describes the situation in the global media space during the COVID-19 pandemic. The intensive use of intertextuality and intermediality is caused by satisfying the needs of the audience to reduce the fear of the unknown and become familiar with new concepts and new situations by connecting familiar and new content. The excessive amount of unknowns that existed especially at the beginning of the pandemic had to be replaced by earlier experiences to make it easier for the audience to adopt the desired patterns of behavior. Once patterns of behavior are adopted, they begin to be used for commercial purposes as well.
|