| Whether to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status in 2000 was an issue heatedly debated among top level leadership in the United States government, and also one that aroused rare media criticism of the administration. It has been a general pattern that the media follow the president in covering foreign policy issues, China policy in particular. But in the case of the 2000 PNTR debate, the media seemed to have broken the pattern and exercised their independence.What exact position did the media take? Were they still "the government’s little helper", or did they take their independent positions? If they were independent in this case, what were the circumstances that made them so? Given that a myriad of pro-and anti-administration rhetoric all competed for media attention, how did the media select these opinions, and how does this show the media’s position?Based on Robert Entman’s cascade model, this thesis argues that when top-level leadership is severely split on a non-conflict foreign policy issue, the media will not faithfully reflect what the administration has said in their coverage; rather, they will exercise independence through patterning supporting and opposing frames to serve their own agenda.The research method of this thesis is content analysis. By coding presidential frames from President Clinton’s public remarks on PNTR, as well as supporting and opposing news articles on the topic from the New York Times and the Washington Post, this thesis discontinued the cascade model and found that even when top-level leadership was disunited, the media showed only limited independence and were still generally supportive of the president. Although some opposing views (37%of the total frames) were published, they were not independent opinions of the media, but raised by other political players and adopted by the media. In terms of the media’s own view (as reflected in editorials), criticisms were extremely rare.The media’s limited independence is manifested through their careful patterning of pro-and anti-PNTR frames in news articles. Anti-PNTR frames, although relatively large in number, were low in quality, with very few capable of posing real challenge to the president. Moreover, a lot of them were mere China-bashing cheap talks, and the majority targeted at criticizing the less-significant, supplementary frames, leaving the crucial presidential frames largely intact. In terms of pro-PNTR frames, the media provided substantive support to the president. They re-adjusted the weight given to each presidential frame in media coverage, highlighting presidential frames closely-related to people’s interests and ideological frames, while downplaying the rhetorical one. This shows that the media were not simple surrogate voices of the administration; in the patterning of both supporting and opposing frames, their own agenda of objectivity and appealing to the public were also at play.This study contributes to the research on media independence in US foreign policy reporting in two aspects:first, it expands the issue area from military conflicts to the larger non-military cases which are less salient and supposedly could give the media more room for discretion. By including the wider spectrum of cases, theories on this topic could be put into broader tests. Second, it proposes a more refined research design than existing ones by including the pro-administration rhetoric. By breaking down pro-administration frames and looking specifically into how the media highlighted certain frames and downplayed others, the media’s position on the issue and their level of independence could be better understood. |
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