A Comparative Research On China And US Foreign News Coverage

The research is designed to objectively and rationally explore the characteristics and underlying causes of US-related international news reports from Xinhua News Agency and those China-related news reports from The New York Times(nytimes.com), with samples ranging from October 1, 2009 to December 31, 2009. The purpose of this study is to enable our country's media players to utilize world-famous foreign media's advantages in order to enhance our country's capabilities of international news coverage and ameliorate the overall communication quality.The combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, which are complementary research methodologies, contributes to more accurate and acceptable conclusions. Content analysis, a frequently used methodology employed in social sciences, is applied in the study to analyze samples from Xinhuanet and Nytimes in the fourth quarter of 2009. The comparative research content analyzed reporting frequency, datelines, themes, news styles, attributions (favorable, unfavorable and neutral), accompanying pictures, with a study focus on news agenda-setting such as agenda on politics, economy, society, culture, environment and some related hot spots. To compensate for the limitations of content analysis methodology, qualitative research-based news framing analysis is employed to research on a news reporting case–involving Obama's visits to China in mid-November, reported from the perspectives of Xinhua News Agency and The New York Times.In the epilogue, with the purpose of strengthening Xinhuanet's communication power to better serve the country's interests and internationalizing Xinhuanet, the researcher attempts to propose the following measures for Xinhua News Agency: a). balance international news reporting frequency, b). diversify the news styles (e.g."feature"to be added), c). establish some interactive columns such as"Letters From Readers", d). add"editorial"to articulate the views towards international affairs for national interests. The paper finally mentions limitations of this study such as small sample size and subjectivity inherited from content analysis.