A Comparative Study Of New York Times And China Daily’s News Coverage Of The COVID-19 Vaccine

COVID-19 vaccine is the first vaccine in human history to be paid special attention to and reported by media organizations from its R&D progress to clinical trials and then to market.Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,with the development of vaccine in various countries represented by China,the United States and the United Kingdom,vaccines produced by pharmaceutical companies have been gradually put into use.Under such circumstances,problems have been concerned about vaccine trails,effectiveness,safety,distribution,vaccination,and so on.Moreover,vaccine hesitation has become a strong resistance to the world’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.With the continuous emergence of variants,there is still a long way to go to eliminate vaccine hesitation.The acceleration of COVID-19 vaccine development gave chances to major countries in the world to compete in aspects of research and development,production capacity,characters of storage and transport,efficiency rates and safety of the vaccine,reflecting their races in economic,political and other fields as well,being verified in media reports.Based on this trend,the COVID-19 vaccine’s media images and the ideological differences exhibited in news coverage deserve special attention.Adopting critical discourse analysis as the research method,this paper selected reports of the New York Times and China Daily as the research samples,closely studied on three dimensions developed by Fairclough as an important approach to do critical discourse analysis:text,discourse practice and social practice.Based on the general condition of reporting quantities and time periods of reports,this paper examined samples from the respects of vocabulary use and text structure when discussing characters of texts.With regard to the discourse practice,this paper resorted to quantitative method,observing characteristics of agenda setting of the two media,and then discussing the intertextuality features of reports by analyzing the types,specificity and paraphrasing modes of information sources.Finally,this paper summarized and combed the reflections and constructions on social reality by the New York Times and China Daily after finishing the previous two parts of studies.Analysis on the text of news content made it possible to identify different strategies of the two media to employ words.The New York Times clearly distinguished "we" and "they" in the pattern of vocabulary use,generating an ideological opposition.China Daily tended to emphasize Chinese stories by reinforcing "we" and downplaying "they".In terms of text structure,the New York Times utilized huge amounts of foregrounded expressions to selectively highlight and dilute some factors,influencing the way audiences view problems.China Daily chose to intersperse a lot of background information into the news events but didn’t directly give them vaccine-related connotations in order to offer more free room and guide audiences to think about certain questions.Analysis on the discourse practice of the New York Times and China Daily suggested that their news coverage mainly talked about vaccine R&D,vaccination and vaccine distribution events which could be divided clearly into two reporting stages.Specifically,the New York Times tended to report domestic and foreign issues in a neutral or a negative tone,focusing on vaccination activities and paying much attention to the discussion of issues in the field of vaccine-related economic affairs.China Daily devoted more in organizing positively or neutrally toned materials,trying to portray the image of China as a responsible power that always committed to its promises and contributed to the equal distribution of COVID-19 vaccine under the huge global crisis.Generally speaking,the New York Times resorted to more information from various sources than China Daily when looking at the amounts.The governments,health experts and scholars from other fields played as the main information sources of the two media.When paraphrasing information from others,the New York Times mostly used direct ways to cite,but the specificity of its sources was weak.Moreover,compared with China Daily,the New York Times used more integrated paraphrasing patterns in the ways of information citation,which could not only dilute and avoid responsibility,enhance the credibility of the reports,but also infiltrate the reporters’ views and editorial choices into the reports.Analysis on social practice revealed that two media’s reports on the COVID-19 vaccine not only reflected the local vaccine issues,but also echoed the different diplomatic styles and principles of China and the United States.Notions of media organizations who upheld journalistic professionalism and the Marxist view of journalism could also be reflected in the reporting strategies of the two media.As two domestic mainstream media playing significant role in global context,reports of them also played critical roles in removing vaccine hesitation and promoting vaccine uptake domestically and enhancing national identities globally.