Business Ethical Issue And Its Coverage By News Media

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to bridge the gap in the literature world concerning the impact news media may cause that might potentially affect how business ethical values are shaped in different countries.The paper looks at whether there is a significant differences between news media in China and that in the United States when covering the same business ethical issue.The paper focuses on the issue of Chinese milk scandal that occurred in the year of 2008.What makes the scandal worthy of analysis is the specific involvement of state-owned companies engaged in the unethical business practice.Moreover,the impact of this scandal can be said as global when various countries that had been importing Chinese products lost their trust and imposed bans for Chinese products.In order to understand the general context of how news media in China and the United States operate,a brief account for media in each country is explained apart from the explanation of mass media in general.From these explanations,similarities and differences can be seen from news media in China and the United States.For instance,while there are many arguments criticising Chinese media as being positively biased towards the government,it should be taken into account that 90%of news media in the United States were controlled by six corporations in the year of 2011.This conglomeration of media includes the top-notched media outlets such as ABC News,CBS News,and The Wall Street Journal,just to name a few.Design/methodology/approachThe underlying theoretical framework that is used for the analysis is based on content influence,process and effect studies by Shoemaker and Reese(1996).The paper compares two media outlets(China Daily and The The New York Times)to represent media in each country(China and the United States)in covering an unethical business operation.The purpose of this study is to look at whether or not a significance differences are evident between the two media outlets in covering the issue in terms of four categories,namely the total coverage across the selected time period,the use of source,the prioritisation of topic choice,and the overall framing tendency towards the government.The study period was from December 1st,2007 to December 31st,2009.Firstly,relevant keywords were inputted to the web sites of China Daily and The New York Times.Only relevant articles directly related to the scandal were selected.An Excel worksheet was generated to record the article identification number,the full date,the title of each article,the categorisations code,and the link to each article.Secondly,the contents of the articles were copied to separate Word files and were skim-read to determine the categorisations and coding procedure.Thirdly,the contents were thoroughly read again in detail to be manually screened to assign the categorisation codes.This screening was done twice in two different occasions in order to achieve objective scores.After all of the relevant articles were assigned with codes,both descriptive and inferential statistics are used as means of analysis and to confirm the significance of the results.Descriptive statistics is used to describe the frequency distribution of each of the categorisations.Inferential statistics that is used is chi-square test of independence to test whether two variables are independent of each other.All of the findings are computed on the significance level of p = 0.05.FindingsFor the news coverage across the selected time period,both China Daily and The New York Times show a rather similar trend in covering the issue and both of the newspapers began to publish the scandal in the same month(September 2008),which is probably due to the international news flows shared between the two countries.Additionally,the number of articles by China Daily is relatively large in comparison to The New York Times.Several reasons are presented.Firstly,even though China Daily published more news about the scandal,there are many similar articles with different headlines.Secondly,there are many similar articles in terms of contents that were originated from different sources,such as Xinhua.Thirdly,it is assumed that the Chinese media was being more open in exposing the scandal to the general public but there was no clear evidence to support this assumption.Similarly,The New York Times covered less of the same issue for several reasons.The most likely reason is that during the same time period,the United States was experiencing a national-scale economic crisis as well as encountering its own business scandals and the collapses of some of its huge enterprises,such as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the investment scandal of Bernard Madoff.For this reason,news media in the United States might have potentially shifted the attention to cover the crisis in its own country.Another reason whether or not The New York Times tends to downplay international issues compared to its own national issues might be benefited from future research.For the use of source,there is no significant difference found between China Daily and The New York Times in their source usage.However,it is worth mentioning that both of the newspapers use official sources as the bulk of their articles.For the prioritisation of topic choice,there is a significant difference between China Daily and The New York Times in prioritising what topics to be published.China Daily is significantly more likely to cover the issue of governance which mainly emphasises government effort in overcoming the scandal.On the other hand,China Daily is significantly less likely to cover social issues such as public critics and lawsuit filings.These results can be explained by the deliberate action by the government in order to maintain social order so as not to create a 'domino effect'which may have influenced other members of the society to associate themselves with the unsocial behaviour which might have been detrimental to the public order.At the same time,The New York Times is significantly more likely to cover political issues,the majority of which have negative comments towards the Chinese government.For the overall framing tendency,a significant difference was found between China Daily and The New York Times in framing their articles.Although both of the newspapers share similar characteristic in framing the news by choosing a rather 'neutral' approach,The New York Times is more likely to publish politically negative tones criticising the Chinese government,its political and legal systems,while one positive framing from China Daily was found.Research limitationsThere are some limitations in this paper that is important to be addressed.Firstly,the author has an Indonesian nationality,was born and raised in the capital city for over twenty years.He lived in Australia for three years before continuing the study in China for two years.This might greatly influence the cultural background and reasoning of the author.Although objective approach has been carefully exercised,it does not limit the possibility that there is still a lot of room for subjective judgment.Secondly,the understandings of media bias and ethical reasoning that have been used throughout this paper are originated from Western sources.Even though Western theories has become an integral part of global context,the differences of cultures and long historical experiences of the different countries should be taken into account.For this reason,the author finds the need for further research which implements original media theories and ethical reasoning originated from Chinese scholars.Lastly,the author admits his limitation in Chinese which prevented him to use Chinese sources in Mandarin.A problem that seemed cannot be avoided is that,in many occasions,the contents of the English translations of the major Chinese newspapers are somewhat 'lighter' than the original Mandarin counterparts.This can be understood because the audience of the English translations is very different from the Chinese audience.As a consequence,depending on the context,the framing of the news may be different.This paper,although has utilised Chinese sources,is still limited to Chinese sources that are published in English.