The Negative Construction Of Chinese National Images By Mainstream American Newspapers

The national image of a country relies on a relatively stable and comprehensive evaluation given by the public from all international societies. And the public's understanding and evaluation of another country rely heavily on the reports and descriptions of their own mass media in which the mainstream newspapers play an important role. But newspapers can't be completely objective, because they are influenced by many subjective factors, such as something related to some core national interests, their value orientations and their audience awareness, all of which will affect their tendencies in the process of choosing highlights and contents in reporting. Under this kind of deviated reporting, to some extent,the understanding of the public to a certain thing will be misled, which will make them view the real truth in a better or worse way and construct some positive or negative images just like what these newspapers want them to be. Based on this nature of mass media, I found that the mainstream U.S. newspapers constructed the Chinese national image in a negative way, which would be proven by analyzing the reports of New York times and Washington Post reporting about the Mattel toy recall incident in 2007 through quantitative analysis method, and the specific Chinese negative images constructed by them would also be analyzed and the reasons that contributed to this negative tendency in their reporting would be explored as well.This article is divided into four chapters. The first three chapters will summarize and present three specific negative images of China constructed by the mainstream American newspapers(the New York times and Washington post) in detail. And the first chapter will focus on the blamed image of China by emphasizing its wrongdoing in this incident itself. The second chapter will introduce the image that China plays an negative actor in its internal market place by analyzing from the perspective of enterprises, government and individuals. The third chapter will present the image that China is an irresponsible player in international society for its ignorance and blindness to the safety of its consumers. The fourth chapter will analyze the reasons why the mainstream American newspapers construct the China's images in a negative way in three ways.By analyzing these four chapters above, we can not only know the specific negative images of China built by the mainstream American newspapers in this Mattel recalling incident, but also understand the reasons that contribute to this negativity, which helps us to form a more objective and rational mind to read the news from American authoritative newspapers, and also contributes to bring some inspirations for China to learn how to use mass media to shape and spread some positive images of China in the international society.