The Google/China Face-Off: Two Stories, One Event An Analysis Of Media Framing And Representation Of The Google/China Coverage By Chinese And American Newspapers

By setting out to empirically answer the question-Does an international event or issue take on different ideological frames when mediated across countries, and if so, how?-the study analyzes a sample of American and Chinese newspaper coverage of the recent Google/China incident.The research employs the methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for its systematic examination of language to unpack latent or embedded social constructs, power relationships and socio-cultural ideologies. Undertaken in both a micro and macro level of analysis, CDA specifically extracts the dialogical "imprints" of media frames by examining their construction against the backdrop of social,political and historical contexts.The analysis reveals three dominate themes across the Chinese and American coverage that can be classified as:"National Identity," "Internet Ideologies," and "Inflated Global Image." The discursive tactics and ideological underpinnings that frame these themes vary drastically between countries, resulting in markedly different narratives of the same story. The American coverage draws upon military jargon and national defence security in order to cement its national identity, while simultaneously polarizing China by using a hegemonic Western-centric model of a "democratic Internet" as a referent. The Chinese coverage deviates from its propagandistic nature by subtly bolstering its national identity in a new stance of "national conviction" in the face of Western models and discursively "normalizing" its censorship stance by playing on the referent of "other countries." The author concludes that the international event of the Google/China incident indeed subsumes markedly different ideological frames when mediated across countries by such discursive tactics as "binary oppositions," "Othering," and "reverse Orientalism.'...