Agenda Setting And Discourse Strategy:the Research On Media Agenda Network Of The New York Times Coverage About Beijing Winter Olympics

2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is a window for overseas to observe China’s development and build China’s image.International situation is complicated and sino-US relations are evolving dynamically.Studying the reports of on Beijing Winter Olympic Games can improve the international communication level of China’s sports.Taking the electronic edition of New York Times,an internationally renowned media,as the research object,this paper selects all 442 reports on Beijing Winter Olympics from July 31,2015 to March 20,2022.Based on the network agenda setting theory,content analysis,semantic network analysis and discourse analysis are used to reveal their discourse strategies.The purpose is to present the characteristics of the New York Times’ coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics,the way of constructing the media network agenda and issue relations,and explore the persuasiveness and realistic basis of the agenda to the American and even the international public.The study found that most of the reporters in the New York Times who participated in the coverage of Beijing Winter Olympics specialized in non-sports areas such as politics and society,and most of the coverage pages were about Asia-Pacific relations.Anonymous sources and indirect speech are often used,official speeches of government agencies of other countries are adopted,voices from all sides of China and folk discourse of other countries are weakened,and psychological proximity is often constructed for Chinese readers with the identity of Asian journalists.In terms of agenda-setting this paper divides the nine major issues into four categories according to their correlation strength.The analysis finds that there are fewer global issues and more regional issues.Special attention is usually on Chinese politics and international relations,with a focus on China-us relations.China’s sports issues are reported positively,while the world health security issues are relatively objective and neutral,and less attention is paid to economic issues.Under the influence of international situation and social events,issues are more purpose-oriented than fact-oriented.In terms of relationship construction,The New York Times often interprets the Beijing Winter Olympics closely with abstract values such as human rights and nationalism with the idea of "Partial Truth+Subjective Interpretation",creating the antagonistic relationship between China and the world.In addition,semantic relations in the media network agenda of The New York Times are mainly neutral and negative,and tend to build ostensibly objective but actually negative semantic relations.Its persuasive basis mainly comes from objective facts universally agreed upon,attractive media reality catering to audience preferences and social consensus permeated by government power.Western media organizations,national interests and government will form a community with consistent discourse positions.Finally,based on the above research findings,this paper believes that the international communication of sports events in China can be optimized and improved from three aspects:first,emphasis should be placed on the sports-oriented nature of reporting;Second,use the discourse strategy for reference,strengthen the supervision and guidance of public opinion;Third,it highlights diverse folk discourses such as ethnic minorities and stresses global shared values.