A Research On Public Opinion In The New York Times' Of China Reports

Public opinion about China in western news media has long been attracting the attention of academics. This thesis attempts to quantify China-related international public opinion (CIPO) and pinpoint the factors that affect CIPO by probing into news reports that are rooted with public opinion of news media and via content analyzing six years of news reports about China in the New York Times, one of the most influential newspapers in the world.This thesis examines 12 indicators including total number of news reports, word count of each news report, topic and news source etc involved in news reports, in an effort to describe the trends of CIPO in The New York Times from five frames of scale, presentation, content, participant and preference. Meanwhile, based on Shoemaker's theory of extra-media influence, this paper resorts to the US opinion polls about China and indicators of China's social change into analysis in order to determine whether correlation exists between these extra-media variables and CIPO.This thesis concludes that although fluctuating dramatically in certain years, the trends of CIPO in The New York Times, which is closely related with the US national interests, remains stable and converges with US's domestic's public opinion. Fundamental frames of public opinion have not been changed, but are well tuned to accommodate China's dramatic developments in recent years. As a matter of fact, all the efforts have been made to consolidate this interest and value based frames. The thesis also finds that the Chinese government can play an active role in guiding CIPO. Therefore, the thesis suggests that the Chinese government be more active in the process of opinion forming and play up their role as the most important news sources.