This paper studies the degree of congruence between the headlines and text bodies in The Guardian and the Daily Mail reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. The hypothesis is that The Guardian should be less sensationalist, less politically and negatively biased than the Daily Mail, as well as scoring a higher degree of congruence. The research is based on the framework provided by the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. The paper first outlines the theoretical preliminaries necessary for the methodology, drawing on recent studies in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis, especially the studies that analyse online discourse on the pandemic, as well as ideology and negativity bias in news discourse. Additionally, the paper outlines and defines key concepts of congruence analysis, namely cohesion and coherence, which this paper uses to establish the working definition of congruence as a spectrum ranging from incongruence to complete congruence. In the section on methodology, a detailed account of the corpus is presented as well as the specifics of the method to determine the degree of congruence between the headline and the text body. The discussion of the results shows that the hypothesis was only partially verified since there is no significant difference in the degree of congruence between The Guardian and the Daily Mail. The paper concludes that the similarities may be because The Guardian underwent a change in format bringing it closer to a tabloid, and that during the early days of the pandemic, there was no significant ideological polarisation between the left and right-wing news sources.