A Comparative Study Of The Agenda Setting Of COVID-19 Coverage By China Daily And New York Times

This thesis selects the COVID-19 reports in the early(January 2020),middle(June 2020)and late(January 2021)periods of the novel coronavirus outbreak by China Daily and the New York Times,two typical major media in China and the United States.Among the selected 6063 reports on Covid-19 epidemic,3179 are from China Daily,2884 are from The New York Times.This thesis makes an in-depth study of the reports on Covid-19 epidemic in the two media to explore the similarities and differences in agenda setting between China Daily and the New York Times.It aims at providing reference for the future practical work of reporting on the related issues in China.This thesis is to answer three questions: 1.What are the similarities and differences between China Daily and The New York Times in reporting novel coronavirus epidemic? 2.What are the similarities and differences in agenda setting between China Daily and The New York Times? 3.What are the underlying reasons behind the differences between China Daily and The New York Times in reporting the novel coronavirus epidemic?To answer the above questions,this thesis adopts content analysis method,and analyzes the data with the help of LDA topic modeling and Ucient and other network analysis tools.It is found that the highest proportions of reports by China Daily and The New York Times are respectively: government(51.24%)vs the public(25.29%)in the sources of information;news(41.90% vs 31.07%)in reporting types;government departments(28.75%)vs medical professionals(30.20%)in reporting subjects;progress reports(38.22% vs 31.52%)in reporting content;government initiative agenda setting(52.85%)vs non-government agenda setting(75.97%)in the initiative of government agenda setting.Besides,it makes a degree-centrality analysis of the contents in the two major media respectively in order to verify the relevance of their reports and their keywords.It also summarizes the similarities and differences in the characteristics of China Daily and The New York Times media reports in this Covid-19 epidemic issue,and expounds the reasons for these characteristics from the aspects of media nature,cultural environment and news principle.Several conclusions are drawn,such as the same reporting quantity and time distribution,different attention focuses and different reporting strategies of the two media reports on the Covid-19 epidemic.The analysis of the report differences between the two typical major media in the two countries can improve and perfect the previous contrastive research on agenda setting and is of theoretical and practical significance.