A Study Of Reports On Jingju By The New York Times From The Perspective Of Framing Thery

Xiqu,namely traditional Chinese opera,is a comprehensive performing art combining various art forms including literature,music,dance,stage art etc.,considered a typical representative of traditional Chinese art and culture.With the revival of traditional culture in current China and the implementation of stepping-out policy of Chinese culture,traditional Chinese opera such as jingju,usually called Peking opera,has been offered more opportunities to perform abroad,showing the special charm of Chinese culture on the world stage.Nowadays mass media provide a major way for most people to get a knowledge of the society and the world,so news reports and critiques of mass media often play a significant role in the process of public cognition.The New York Times,as one of the most important mainstream media in the US,is treated to be typical and representative among the American media due to its prevalent status in global media community.The New York Times ranks the third place among the American media in terms of circulation and enjoys a good reputation for having gained the most Pulitzer Prizes.In the background of more frequent Sino-western cultural exchanges,studying the reports on jingju by The New York Times helps us learn the current position of the international communication of it and the true status and image of Chinese culture in the world,so that China's policies of cultural dissemination and communication can be adjusted to the reality.Therefore,this dissertation will focus on relating reports of The New York Times about jingju by analyzing what the paper reports and how it usually reports,hoping to find out some inherent principles of the paper's news reporting and the reasons why the paper comes up with those ideas and comments.By sampling articles on jingju of The New York Times dating from the year of 1980 to 2016,the dissertation tries to identify the characteristics of the amount,length,type of news,topics,perspectives,key words,and tendency etc.of the relating articles and analyze the potential meanings between the lines.The study is mainly based on the framing theory in communication with consideration of culture hegemony theory by Antonio Gramsci,discourse theory by Michel Foucault,and orientalism by Edward Wadie Said.The dissertation adopts a comprehensive research method combining quantitative analysis,mainly content analysis,and qualitative analysis like text analysis with the knowledge of xiqu taken into consideration.The result indicates that The New York Times has kept continuous attention on jingju but the interest is decreasing.Its reports are basically about performances in the US with various report frames and often say a lot about background information of a performance.The reports attach great importance to telling the fact and using the technique of balanced reporting.The paper's reviews of jingju performances are basically professional and do not avoid sharp criticism.However,some reviews are,to some degree,biased in commenting the artistic characteristics of jingju though the paper is widely acknowledged as unbiased,probably because its news reporting is based on the world-views and concepts of values prevailing in the American society despite the fact that it is actually independent from the US government.As a result,the researcher suggests the community of jingju paying attention to the theorization of the art form in order to stimulate the formation of its theory system and discourse system with Chinese characteristics,which concerns cultural self-esteem and self-recognition of the Chinese people.The originality of the dissertation lies,firstly,in the fact that few studies exist in the part where communication and the art of xiqu overlap,and secondly,in the perspective of combining humanity and social science.The limitation of the dissertation is mainly resulted from the possible error caused by small amount of samples and the subjectivity due to the lack of research experience and resources.