Research On China-related Reports Of American Main Paper Media

This paper is on the basis of content analysis to the main paper media in the USA, take "The New York Times" and "Time" (from 1999 to 2008) as example. The result shows that American main paper media choose China-related reports tendentiously. It analyzes its reason and explains problems during our external communication. Meanwhile, it gives some suggestion on how to improve effect of our external communication.The introduction part briefly reviews background of topic selection, research method, research samples, as well as related research home and abroad. Walter Lippmann points out that "News paper is original motive to set local topic for discussion" in his work "theory of public opinion" in 1922. Westerners have different impression of Chinese in different times. In recent research on China-related reports of American main paper media, there are four famous theoretical results, they are "demonizing China theory", "national image theory", "national interests theory" and "news framework theory".The second chapter and third chapter study China-related reports of "the New York times" and "Time" from 1999 to 2008 on the basis of content analysis. This paper not only calculates quantity and frequency of reports, but also enumerates fields that the reports related to. The author does not evaluate these reports with simple standards such as "negative", "neutral" and "positive". It researches deeply by using "semantic content analysis", "comparison of different bodies of content" and "trend comparison".The fourth chapter analyses results further. It discusses reasons that why American main paper media chose news topics tendentiously. The reasons are: media in the USA seen themselves as "supervisor" and "critic", they regard China as "the others" and take the responsibility of "salvator", multiple factors influence media field. This chapter also deals its harms to our country: mass misunderstand information leads to "China threat theory", mass misrecognize real medium as social reality, national image is in danger because of cultivation process in heterogeneous society. The fifth chapter does some considerations according to American main paper media's inclination. It holds that there are some problems during the process of external communication: we do not change our minds and take correct attitude towards to existing problems in our society, we do not pay enough attention to communication effect and mainly focuses on external publicity, and we are in the dilemma of external communication marginalization. Therefore, the author belie eves that we can take some actions to deal with these questions: importing media abroad to overcome communication barriers, communicating Chinese values by taking culture as entrance, taking part in agenda-setting progress actively to rebuild national image.