Foreign News Research

This paper is the first systematic, in-depth study of foreign policy news as a form of coverage. From the perspective of media presentation, it investigates how media explains the government’s foreign policies to the domestic public, and the challenges and preservation of news professionalism as a result. The paper also looks into the ideological attributes of foreign policy news, the relationship between media and diplomacy and the possibilities of improving Xinhua News Agency’s foreign policy coverage.Foreign policy news has in the past been put under the category of international news, being confused with foreign news. However, given their different circumstances. the media’s coverage of such two forms of news varies as a result of the controlling factors, coverage approaches and the presented images. Countries with media covering foreign news are observers of the world, the media presents images of foreign countries:in foreign policy news, countries with its media are participants in the world, it presents a world based on the extend to which it is involved in international affairs. The two forms of coverage are strikingly different. A country’s diplomacy is the extension of its internal affairs. So when it comes to the approach of how the said country is involved in the world, news coverage will be endowed with domestic implication. News coverage will concern itself with national interests, giving news-incidents the dual effects in both the domestic and the international arena. News coverage is thus faced with the tension between protecting national interests and news professionalism.In a bid to reach a universally-relevant conclusion regarding foreign policy news, this paper adopts a comparative approach to investigating the common features and differences of covering the same news by media of different countries and ownership. A variable. the conflicting/cooperative relationship between countries, is also factored in to analyze the changes in the dominating frameworks in media and the conformity of different countries’ diplomatic rhetoric.The research is based on the study of the peculiarities and universalities of "the China Issue". conflict-incidents of different degrees of tension affecting China and the US. and the two cases of cooperation forms with typical significance. A comparative analysis is conducted to compare the relevant coverage by China’s Xinhua News Agency and the Associated Press of the US.The paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter Ⅰ analyzes the factors affecting diplomacy news, and investigates the political, social and organizational environment for foreign policy news production.Chapter Ⅱ looks into media construction in diplomatic crisis. Studying the case of the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia in1999. the chapter investigates the performance of media as exponents of crises with different national ideologies and interests.Chapter Ⅲ analyzes media construction in ordinary conflicts. Studying the Obama administration’s arms sales to Taiwan in2010. this chapter investigates whether media has more freedom when the degree of eoniliet tension is lower. The chapter further studies whether the coverage boosts the feeling of similarity between Chinese and US social experiences and generates the common understanding of conflicts.Chapter Ⅳ analyzes media construction in the diplomacy of state leaders. Studying Bush’s2002visit to China, this chapter investigates whether media take official lines in covering state leaders’ritualistic foreign activities in a cooperative context.Chapter Ⅴ analyzes media construction in diplomatic negotiation. Studying US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue2011. this chapter examines how media present national interests and the concerned interests of the counterpart country.Chapter Ⅵ gets some conclusions of the study. It argues that foreign policy news coverage is to explain the rationality and legitimacy of a given country’s foreign policies, and to protect the authority of its power structure and national coherence. It is fair to say that diplomacy news coverage employs prejudices to construct a stronghold in which those involved rest assured to maintain their national positions.