English News Coverage Of Russia In Ap And Xinhua

This paper aims at comparing English news coverage of Russia within the field of news discourse.The study is both contrastive and corpus-assisted.News articles were first culled from the official websites of Xinhua News Agency and the Associated Press(AP)using typical search terms ‘Russia’,‘Moscow’,and ‘Putin’ within a time frame from September to December,2019.Duplicates,bylines,ads,pictures,and videos were all removed.After the exclusion of some news stories that had mentioned Russia as mere background information,the final number of news samples was 908,more than four hundred texts in each group,totaling 280,925 words.In order to measure how Russia was reported and represented in the news,three variables were first established,that is,length,theme,and image.In terms of the length of an article,reports composed of less than 200 words,200 to 400,and more than 400 words were tagged as ‘short’,‘medium’,and ‘long’ respectively.Meanwhile,four thematic categories,namely politics,culture,economy,and society,were developed.The third variable ‘image’ referred to how Russia,the government and its people in this case,was represented in the news,and the impression left on audience may be negative,neutral,or positive.Then the relationship between variables was examined before the key words analysis,and the comparison on subtopics was further conducted.It was found that the AP news texts were significantly longer than those from Xinhua(p<.05),around 200 words more per text on average.Political stories were foremost among other thematic reports,accounting for more than a half in each group.Besides,AP tended to portray Russia on the scale from neutral to negative,while its representation in Xinhua ranged from neutral to positive.The difference reached statistical significance(p <.05).Moreover,the coverage on culture,in which sports news took up a large part,was found correlated with long articles and a positive impression in both groups.The negative image of Russia presented in AP news was linked more with the topic of politics,while it was associated more with the news on society in Xinhua.Analyses of two high-frequency words,‘cooperation’ in Xinhua and ‘doping’ in AP,revealed that China,placing the emphasis on cooperation in various fields,had a close relationship with Russia,while AP perceived the Russian practice of using drugs in sports competition as a longstanding,widespread doping program backed by the government.Overall,the two news outlets agreed that Russia had abundant natural resources,especially gas and oil,had many powerful new weapons,and played an important role in the political arena.In general,the country,who cooperated with China in various fields,was depicted as a friendly and responsible partner in the Xinhua news,though sometimes bothered with domestic terrorists.However,it was described as a threat that interfered and defied rules in AP’s reportage.The current study has proposed a basic research framework to analyze news stories in the area of news discourse.Ample evidence extracted from the news corpus was presented in the paper,which may contribute to future studies such as news reporting and editing,national image,language learning and so on.Hopefully,this paper may also provide some thoughts for news readers.