A Study Of Western Mainstream Media Coverage Of China-Related Disasters

Since the 21st century,China has developed rapidly and become the second-largest economy in the world.However,the US and Western countries find it difficult to accept the fact of China’s rapid development,and with the help of their long-held dominance of international public opinion,a large amount of subjective and negative information has appeared in their coverage of China,giving the international public an unobjective and unjust impression of China and affecting the presentation of China’s true,comprehensive and objective international image.Disaster journalism is an important category in news reporting,and disaster journalism research has reached another peak,especially after COVID-19 swept the world in 2020.Western media have a predominantly negative bias when reporting on Chinarelated disasters,due to stereotypes such as news culture and ideology.With the current world situation becoming more complex,the tendency,content,and,characteristics of Western disaster-related reporting on China are worthy of in-depth study.The British,American,and Australian mainstream media have a large say in international public opinion,and their news reports on China-related disasters are fastspreading and influential.Therefore,three mainstream newspapers,The Times(UK),The New York Times(US,)and The Sydney Morning Herald(Australia),were chosen as the subjects of this study.Using the Factiva database,this study retrieved disaster reports involving China for a total of five years from 2017-to 2021,and after manual de-weighting,a total of 168 research samples were obtained,including many disaster events such as swine fever,flu,ods,and chemical plant explosions.This study uses content analysis and framing theory to discover the characteristics of Western mainstream media coverage of China-related disasters and the image of the Chinese state presented.The US and Western media coverage of China’s disaster news mainly involved four categories:natural disasters,accidents and disasters,social security events,and public health events.Since COVID-19 is a major public health event between 2017 and 2022,there is already a large amount of research literature on the topic,generally as a separate section,so the sample for this study was selected to remove reports of outbreaks involving Newcastle COVID-19 in China,and a detailed review and discussion of reported studies of Newcastle COVID-19 is provided in the literature review section.The introductory section of Chapter 1 introduces the study’s background,value,and methodology and asks the following four research questions:What are the high-frequency topics covered by the three Western mainstream media in their coverage of the China disaster?What are the reporting tendencies?What are the reasons for their presentation?How should the Chinese media respond?Chapter 2 analyses a five-year sample of China-related disaster coverage by the three media outlets from 2017 to 2021,focusing on four dimensions:the number of stories,topics,tendencies,and high-frequency words.The study found that natural disasters were reported most frequently;negative reports accounted for the highest proportion;and the top three noun high-frequency words were "China","people" and "flood".Chapter 3 uses content analysis to analyze the content characteristics of the three media outlets’ coverage of disasters involving China:building up an image of China as an eastern threat,’storytelling’ narratives,focusing on China’s economic influence,and the use of inaccurate sources.Chapter 4 focuses on the use of framing theory and finds that the frameworks used in Western disaster coverage include:the "othering" framework and the "paraphrasing"neutral framework.Chapter 5 focuses on the reasons for the presentation of China-related disaster coverage:the inherent differences in Chinese and foreign news reporting philosophies,the pressures of the global economic downturn in recent years,ideological differences,and,of course,the underlying conflict of national interests.Chapter 6 concludes by proposing strategies for Chinese foreign media to build a Chinese discourse system in response to the current situation of untruthful and unobjective coverage of disasters involving China in the Western mainstream media:firstly,to face up to the current public opinion environment and jump out of the Western discourse trap;secondly,to improve the timeliness of disaster coverage,increase the strength of voice and nip rumors in the bud;and thirdly,to report on Chinese people with strength and warmth amid disasters.Finally,share China’s wisdom in dealing with disasters with international the 1 public.