| This quantitative content analysis investigates American elite news media's reporting on China. The six media under study are: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and evening news on three broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC. The specific data collected are key words reflecting all the themes or topics referred to in each news story as registered by Newspaper Abstracts and Evening News Abstracts. This study accesses a full description of the media content in the years after the Tiananmen Square tragedy, 1990–1995. The reporting focus, the major topic themes, the patterns of coverage over time, and the similarities and differences across media are described via an exhaustive keyword study of By applying Perl programming, factor analysis, and other statistical strategies, the study yielded the following findings: (1) the six American news media provided a large volume of news events about China, but with limited diversity of event type; (2) twenty major themes were identified with the complex connections between the subtopics and their underlying common themes; (3) the monthly and yearly chronicle reporting patterns during the six years were identified; and (4) the three newspapers differed significantly among themselves in terms of reporting quantity, while the three broadcast networks showed significant agreement with each other in both reporting quantity and topics.; It is hoped that the analysis might provide insight into future studies of more meaningful content study, which should combine content analyses with effect study and audience research to explore the assumptions of communication theories such as agenda-setting and framing. Expanding or deepening content study in all dimensions will provide knowledge concerning not only what the media report, but how and why it is reported. |
