The Image Of Tibet In US And UK Mainstream Newspapers

Mass media plays an important role in shaping the image of a country.In the course of China’s peaceful rise,hyping up "Tibet issue"is one of the common methods for British,American and other Western media to bring shame on the image of China.This dissertation studies on New York Times and The Times which on behalf of American and British mainstream media,selects 610 Tibet-related news reports from 2001 to 2015 from both newspapers.By sorting important concepts and related theories,empirical analysis of data and typical cases,it summarizes the characteristics and trends of the two newspapers and explores the frame construction and historical changes of the Tibet issue.This dissertation focuses on the following two core issues.Are there any fixed news reporting frameworks for American and British mainstream media when reporting the Tibet-related news?If so,what specific frameworks are?The other one is what kind of image of Tibet that American and British mainstream Media was presented in their reports?The dissertation includes seven chapters:The first chapter is the preface that generally presents the overall framework of the study by introducing research background and significance,literature review,research questions,research methods and so on.The second chapter is the part of historical research,which conducting inductive research towards the evolution of China’s image under the perspective of American and British and the historical origin of China’s Tibet issue.Therein,the evolution of image of China is divided into six stages.Chapter three,the research design,covers the reason of sample selection,sample extraction scheme,category construction,research route and reliability test results and so on.Category construction is the essential part of this chapter.On the basis of frame theory proposed by American scholar Gamson,this dissertation respectively starts from the material selection level and construction level in the study of news frame,builds up a set of targeted,systematic"International Tibet-related News Reports Index System".Chapter four and chapter five are the parts of empirical research.Chapter four focuses on detailed study of the characteristics and regularity of Tibet-related news reports presented in New York Times and The Times.Based on the Tibet-related news reports of two newspapers from 2001 to 2015,under the guidance of frame theory and agenda setting theory,the dissertation makes a quantitative study on Tibet-related international news reports with the content analysis method.In chapter five,this dissertation comprehensively uses the research methods such as frame analysis,text mining and case analysis,summarizes and generalizes the image of Tibet,the image of the Dalai Lama and the image of China’s media,which are constructed by the New York Times and The Times.And then draws the images of Tibet from political,economic and cultural these three different aspects.In the end,the countermeasure research part,this dissertation firstly summarizes the impact and characteristics of the image of Tibet which were shaped by American and British mainstream media,then analyzes the causes of these phenomena from five aspects:ideology,national interests,commercial interests,international competition and cultural identity.Furthermore,this dissertation puts forward five countermeasures to improve the image of Tibet.