On The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, The U.s. Media Image Of China

The Beijing Olympic Games is not only a world-renowned sports event, but also the dream of 1.3 billion Chinese people for a century. China could show a peaceful rising image to the world during the Olympics. The world also took the opportunity to take a deeper understanding of the ancient and modern eastern country. The Beijing Olympic Games attracted people from 204 countries and regions in the world. The media at home and abroad were competing fiercely to attract millions of domestic and foreign audiences.In order to know China's national images shaped by the Western mainstream media during Beijing Olympic Games, this paper studied NYT China-related coverage between the Beijing Olympic Games. The paper aims to study the national images shaped by NYT coverage and how NYT make it through its reports, as well as discuss the changes and trend of China's image issue brought by the Olympics.Through content analysis of NYT news coverage, the paper found that NYT paid much more attention on the Chinese society other than sports news. When taking a deeper look of positive and negative issues, the paper found that those Chinese cultural topics are mainly positive while the western "stereotyped prejudices" are still the framework of negative coverage. In addition, the paper summarized the new features of western media's Chinese coverage.