Chinese International Students Framed: A Content Analysis Of American Newspaper Coverage

This thesis attempts to explore the image of Chinese international students (CIS) through the coverage of American mainstream media. The study has chosen 127 news articles relevant to CIS from three major American newspapers from the year of 1992 to 2006. The examined newspapers are The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times.Grounded in the theoretical framework of the Shoemaker and Reese hierarchical model of influences on media content, media framing theory, Hofstede's cultural dimension and subsequent cross-cultural projects, the whole study comprises the quantitative and qualitative content analysis to study how American media build the frame of CIS image, and what has contributed to the making of this frame.This thesis indicates that the CIS images are frequently associated with social and cultural issues and more articles reports the negative side of CIS. Besides, discourse analysis of ideology shows that most news reports are laden with anti-communism and ethnocentric ideology. The ideological frameworks serve as strong impetus to the image of CIS.