An Analysis Of The Coverage Of Tibet Issues By New York Times In The Perspective Of The Frame Theory

In recent years,due to the interference of foreign forces and sporadic unrest and violence in Tibet,the media from different countries have been paying continuous attention to the area.Many scholars in China embarked on studying the ways in which foreign media reported the issues in Tibet,such as Fan Shiming(2000),Li Xiguang(1996),Li Yun(2006)and so forth.In their in-depth research,they found that the US mainstream media's coverage of Tibet issue was neither authentic nor objective.Other researchers discovered that the coverage of Tibet by the German media had the tendency of employing the negative tones.Since newspapers play a critical role in affecting the public's opinions on the political issues,the way which the media employ will reshape the public's perception.Consequently,it is of great importance to understand how the foreign media report the news and their motives concerning issues in China.Adopting the content analysis method and based on the Frame Theory,this thesis tentatively conducts a research on a number of factors,such as story numbers,types of the news,the themes of the news,the favorability,and the tendency in reporting issues about Tibet.The data are the reports from the New York Times published in 2014 and 2015.From the study,the researcher found that the New York Times utilized a huge number of pages to cover the Tibet.The New York Times had a tendency to adopt the news collected by their internal employees and report the news by their own press agencies.In terms of the sources of their reports,the New York Times chose to pay attention to the unilateral speeches made by the so-called exiled government,which was founded by Dalai Lama and the coverage of Tibet by the American government.In their coverage of the Tibet issues,the New York Times neglected the reports written and published by Chinese government and persons concerned in the news.In terms of their attempts in the coverage of the Tibet,the news agency is in favor of the Dalai Lama and his exiled government while ignoring the stance ofChinese government.The news agency regarded Dalai Lama as the spiritual leader of the Tibet and criticized the Chinese government by holding the view that the Chinese government denied the human right.This thesis also looked into the anti-China ideology held by the west.