Research On Cover Story About China In "Time"

In the international transmission, it is a consensus that the image of other country can be reconstructed and interpreted by various factors in media. A country's mass media often reconstruct other country's image by reporting the country's news in intercultural communication. At the twentieth country, the U.S. media with its strong material foundation and advanced communication often play an important role in modeling and disseminating the image of other countries. Therefore, the research on the U.S. mainstream media coverage of China has its significance. In this paper, the cover story of China in"Time"would be the subject. The author tries to understand the China report's angel and preference in"Time", attempts to explore"the image of China"in"Time", and strives to explore the feature and operation mechanism of China report based on variety of factors. The whole thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter one is mainly about the overview of cover story in"Time". First, from"cover story"concept, the author would show the status and the unique value of the cover story in a magazine. Second, the author would introduce the"Time"magazine's history, its influence and its audiences, and then help the readers to understand the typical significance of this research.In Chapter two, it is mainly about the analysis of culture background of American media. On one hand ,the author try to explore the founder Ruth's plot for China, on the other hand, in western culture and the development of Sino-US relations context. Then, the author would like to show the"image of China"in specific political, historical and cultural background.In Chapter three, the 62 cover stories would be selected for systematic discourse analysis. In order to observe the change of"image of China"in vertical movement, based on Time's attitude to China, the author would divide the 62 cover story into for parts, and then describe the 4 parts one by one to see the vertical movement of"image of China". In every section, the author would use discourse analysis to demonstrate the specific picture.Chapter four, the author would present a statistical analysis of the object in the perspective of the report number, the report content, the report tendency and report topic. It can be seen that , the U.S. media which is claim to be"objective"and"neutral"shows a clear tendency in China report and its preference for political content. Through the analysis of report topic to China, we can see that, the selection of topics about China are often anchored by America's own interest, combined with the international situation, China-US relation, and other factors for"agenda setting".In Chapter five, the author try to explain how the US national interest , the subjectivity of the editor and ideological differences simultaneously affect the"China's image"in"Time"magazine. In the meantime, the U.S. specific news ideas, the cultural background of journalists, and media business of operating mechanism also indirectly affect the choice of the topic and the value judgment of China report in"Time".Finally, we should not only call on the U.S. media to enhance its objectivity and neutrality in China report, but also help China enhance its ability in cross-cultural communication to win the initiative of modeling"China's image"for the construction of a peaceful rise of China tomorrow.