A Comparative Study On Cultural Differences In Financial And Economic News Between China And America

With the rapid development of global economic integration, financial and economic news has a fast development and has become the mainstream in news reports; meanwhile, there has an opportunity for people to create a new environment for human’s social and economic activities due to the increasing market demand, Under the audience’s demand and trade competition, the level of newspaper industry has been improved continuously. The coverage of different financial and economic news shares some similar characters, but there are still some differences existing in financial and economic reportage from different countries. The discrepancies of media system and reporter’s different writing styles may take responsibility for the disparities; however, cultural factors exert more influence upon the news reports. Based on intercultural perspectives, this paper takes China Daily and the Wall Street Journal as examples to explore how cultural factors affect the coverage of financial and economic news between China and America.This paper firstly introduces Edward T. Hall’s cultural context model and Geert Hofstede’s five culture dimensions, including power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism and collectivism, masculinity and femininity, long-term versus short-term orientation. Based on the cultural differences between China and America in each dimension and with reference to recent analogous research at home and abroad, this paper respectively selects one hundred pieces of financial and economic news from China Daily and the Wall Street Journal in nearly half of 2012(from June to December) and applies content analysis as the research method which is associated with the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. It discusses and makes a comparative study on the reportage disparities in financial and economic news between two newspapers from intercultural perspective.Through proposing hypotheses and confirming them by making comparative analysis, the data indicates some viewpoints that can be expressed as follows:1) The principal difference based on Hall’s cultural context model is that China Daily tends to give simple, monotonous messages to the readers, while the Wall Street Journal’s coverage is easier to attract the readers by the combination of visual content and video.2) With respect to the point of power distance index, China Daily gives priority to the political and economic news; on the contrary, the Wall Street Journal pays more attention to finance, market and investment news. In other words, the former attaches more attention to the state system, authority and centralization compared to the Wall Street Journal’s comprehensiveness.3) Regarding the aspect of uncertainty avoidance index, China Daily, affected by domestic media’s reports, would rather select positive materials to present than report negative ones. On the contrary, the Wall Street Journal makes proper combinations of diversified subjects objectively to keep the balance of positive and negative news.4) Concerning the influence of individualism and collectivism, China Daily mainly concentrates on collectivism and social harmony compared to the Wall Street Journal’s individualistic views informed by the story telling means.5) With regard to masculinity and femininity, China Daily describes the Chinese government as a group which directs the most of its attention to the social harmony and people’s livelihood, while the Wall Street Journal often focuses on criticizing the government’s negligence of duty and has negative attitudes toward the comments from ordinary people and editorials.6) In regard to the influence of long-term versus short-term orientation, the reportage of financial and economic news by China Daily contains less professional analysis capabilities and prediction than that of the Wall Street Journal’s reportage.