Research On Reports By New York Times About China’s Internet Rumors And Internet Governance

With China’s economic, technological, and military "hard power" gradually increased, the image of China, as an part of the country’s "soft power", is becoming increasingly important. China’s national image is not only concerned with its international communication, but also much related with the image depicted by foreign media. Having a strong political background, solid economic strength, advanced technology, rich experience in communication and advantage of English language, the American mainstream media is able to control the content and direction of the global flow of information. Moreover, it plays a significant role in creating China’s national image. Ever since the 1990 s, we have literally entered the so-called "Internet age". Since the invention of the Internet, there has been a new independent variable added into "national security". In China, the spread of Internet rumors has been a grave problem confronting us. It has brought big challenges for the Internet governance of China. China is constantly exploring new types of governance means and forging effective internet governance models and mechanism, which has attracted the attention of foreign media. It is of great realistic significance to penetrate the China’s national image in the American major media from the perspective of Internet rumors and Internet governance.The thesis is divided into five parts. The introduction section explains the research background, significance of the topic, research difficulties, research ideas and methods. The first chapter is the literature review and theoretical review of frame theory, national image and Internet rumors. The second chapter is a key part of this article. With the application of the frame theory, this chapter attempts to figure out the reporting framework of New York Times, based on the content analysis of its reports on China’s Internet rumors and governance from 2003 to 2014. It has also focused on the depiction of Microblog and Internet rumors by New York Times. The third chapter is about case studies. Two case studies have been conducted by keyword and sentence extraction and word frequency statistics. In the conclusion section, the researcher finds out that the positioning of China’s Internet rumors by the New York Times is different from that by Chinese mainstream media. The paper has seen the Internet rumors in China as information needed by Chinese netizens in popular discourse space, which fills the vacuum generated by official discourse. In the end, the article briefly analyses the reasons why the paper present the image of China in this way.