  Content alignment in news media was an observable information effect of
Covid-19's initial phase. During the first half of 2020, legacy news media
became "corona news" following national outbreak and crises management
patterns. While news media are neither unbiased nor infallible as sources of
events, they do provide a window into socio-cultural responses to events. In
this paper, we use legacy print media to empirically derive the principle News
Information Decoupling (NID) that functions as an information signature of
culturally significant catastrophic event. Formally, NID can provide input to
change detection algorithms and points to several unsolved research problems in
the intersection of information theory and media studies.
