| In the history of human development,the fight against global epidemics has never stopped.As the epidemic became more serious,international information dissemination spread from the disease to the political,economic and cultural spheres,forming a complete and comprehensive communication environment.The United States,as a global superpower,is recognized to dominate the international information flow.In this paper,we would like to examine three main questions: First,in the presentation of the U.S.media,which multiple subjects are involved in the building of the agenda of stigmatizing China? Second,what agendas are built by the U.S.media to stigmatize China? Third,how do multiple actors interact with each other to build a stigmatizing agenda for China? This paper takes the U.S.media’s China-related coverage of Covid-19 as an object of study,and uses agenda building theory and stigma theory to explore the content and motivation behind the U.S.media’s coverage.This paper finds that the U.S.media coverage of Covid-19 outbreak in China can be roughly divided into three stages.In the stigmatizing reports,the U.S.government departments have the largest voice and especially the U.S.president Donald Trump becomes the most important actor in building the China-related agenda.In terms of content,the U.S.media coverage shifted from moral criticism of the outbreak and the prevention and control measures themselves to politically motivated attacks,with a stigmatization agenda that included the two main issues of "the origin of the virus" and "Chinese information concealment" followed by the issues of "China’s economic collapse","totalitarian communist regime" and "mask diplomacy".The emotional attitude of the coverage is basically neutral,but the percentage of positive coverage is extremely low.It reflects the plurality of subjects involved in stigmatization and the diversity and complexity of stigmatized contentsIn terms of reporting discourse,the U.S.media cleverly used metaphorical strategies,and laid out the structure of the text to define China as a totalitarian state in which "Chinese data cannot be trusted and Chinese people cannot be trusted".At the same time,the U.S.media transformed its identity from an "outsider" to a "dominant" player in the stigma issue,gradually politicizing the stigma agenda with saturation coverage and blurring of the issue,which was echoed by other Western media,and eventually,the stigma agenda was changed to a "political" one.The stigmatization of China has been constructed as an international agenda through the use of symbols,driven by national interests and political demands.In terms of reporting discourse,the U.S.media cleverly use lexical strategies such as metaphor and plan the structure of this article to define the image of China as a totalitarian state in which "Chinese data cannot be trusted and Chinese people cannot be trusted".At the same time,when constructing the discourse of stigmatizing China,the U.S.media embedded the statements of politicians and experts and scholars into their own reporting logic,consciously filtering them and giving them new meanings.The U.S.media’s coverage of China is still a mixture of truth and bias,and has yet to shed the narrow perspective left over from the Cold War.To explore the motives behind the stigmatization of China’s epidemic by the U.S.media,this study argues that firstly,it is highly politicized,as U.S.politicians are trying to divert the focus of the epidemic for their own political interests;secondly,it is an inherent ideological view of China,which inevitably puts on racist glasses;and thirdly,it is an attempt to use stigmatization to take advantage of the tug-of-war between China and the United States these two superpowers.Although there were very few articles in the U.S.media calling for anti-racism,they were largely factual in nature,and mainly used the anti-racism rhetoric to express criticism of the U.S.president and dissatisfaction with the U.S.government’s poor handling of the epidemic. |
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