Study On Mechanism And Impact Of US Media Bias On China

With the progress of science and technology,we have witnessed the big explosion of information.As a result,audience's attention has gradually become a kind of scarce resources,which makes media products more attractive to the public with highly topical and non-neutral expressions.Generally,scholars explain the non-neutral media content as media bias or media reporting bias.As a special form of media bias,the bias in Western media's Chinese news,especially US media's Chinese news,has always received much attention among the public,researchers and even the government.This is because the existence of such bias has a significant impact on American people's view on China,which could affect the interaction in various areas between these two countries.As previous works focus on the theories and methods of communication and politics,the main purpose of this paper is to re-examine the US media bias on China within the framework of media economics,and explore its formation mechanism and factors.Firstly,this paper constructs a general media bias model of international news to analyze the deviation of US media report on China.I found that the media need to choose the degree of media bias,because media bias can not only compensate for media's access on information,but also reduce news accuracy and decrease the audience's news needs.Different from other news,the media pay more attention to ideological differences rather than competitor strategies when reporting international news,which leads international news reporting market more like a monopoly market.The diversity of news meet and the lack of corrective mechanism make it easy for different reporters in one media outlet to choose different reporting orientation.The model mainly explores the causes and effects of media bias on China,and the results show that:(1)journalists' media relevance will affect media bias.When journalists' outside salary is high or the switching cost of audience is low,media bias is more likely to occur in the news reported by journalists with higher media relevance.(2)Media bias will affect audience's behavior.When the reading price is low or the switching cost of the audience is high,media bias can lead the audience to take insurance actions,that is to say,media bias has a persuasive effect.Secondly,the conclusion of the model is further confirmed by empirical evidence.(1)In order to test the influence of journalists' media relevance on media bias on China,this paper collects the data of New York Times' news reports on China from 2010 to 2016 by means of web crawlers and manual collections.Based on news content,I construct a index of media bias on China from a theoretical point of view.Empirical regression results show that compared with non-New York Times journalists,New York Times journalists are more likely to report biased news.Similarly,journalists are more likely to report biased news than freelance journalists.At the same time,I find that the choice of different reports within the media only exists in the field of international news,which is consistent with the discussion of my theoretical model.After controlling the personal information of the journalists,the conclusion shows that journalsts' gender,experience and specialty may affect the journalists' reporting strategies.Among them,journalists with overseas study experience or high education are more likely to report neutral news,which also proves the existence of media bias on China.(2)In order to test the influence of media bias on China on the audience's behavior choice,this paper collects news reports from different media on the "Sino-US trade war" incident and the voter support rate representing the American public opinion.In this part,I classify the news reports of American media and other Western media automatically using LDA topic classification machine learning algorithm.The results show that American media tend to report company topic news rather than market topic news.Based on the constructed news reporting index,I find that the tariff news without media bias can explain 42.3% of the voters' support in the long run,which indicates that government behavior is an important consideration of public's political opinion.And company news including media bias can improve voters' support for the president in the short term,which shows that media bias can indeed lead the audience's behavior in the short term.This conclusion is consistent with our discussion of persuasive effect.Our contributions to previous works are shown as follows.Firstly,most of the economics literature on media bias focuses on political news rather than international news.Based on the theoretical model,I find that when reporting international news,the media relevance of journalists is an important reason for explaining media bias,which also enriches the discussion on the causes of media bias.Secondly,most of the preliterature interprets the media bias on China from a political perspective.The conclusion of this study shows that media bias on China originates from the prior bias of the public,and the demand effect can better explain the bias than the capture effect,which provides a new way to understand media bias on China from the perspective of demand.Thirdly,few studies have focused on the impact of media bias on China.This paper quantitative the bias based on machine learning algorithm.Then the research results show that biased news content can change public opinion in short time,which provides empirical evidence for guiding audience decision-making.Fourthly,the conclusion of this paper shows that enhancing the uniqueness of Chinese products and improving the understanding of Chinese and Chinese products by the public can effectively alleviate the US media bias on China.This conclusion starts from the point of view of the reporting object and influences the news choice of the reporting subject by the change of the reporting object,which provides a new perspective for weakening the media bias on China.