Inter-media Agenda Setting In Chinese And Japanese Media Coverage Of The Beijing Winter Olympics

On February 4,2022,the 17-day-long Beijing Winter Olympic Games officially opened.China has been actively hosting large international events since the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing,and this Winter Olympics is an important opportunity for China to show its national image and enhance its international influence.However,before the start of the Winter Olympics,the United States and other countries proposed a so-called "diplomatic boycott" of the Beijing Winter Olympics,which cast a shadow of "politicization of sports" over the Winter Olympics and caused widespread influence in the international community.Among them,Japan,as an ally of the United States,has taken a wavering attitude in the "diplomatic boycott",which has led the Japanese mainstream media to pay great attention to the Beijing Winter Olympics.In this context,it is worthwhile to pay more attention to the agendas of the Chinese and Japanese mainstream media and whether China can set the agenda of the Japanese mainstream media with the advantage of being the host.Based on the inter-media agenda-setting theory and the international information flow relationship,this study attempts to analyze the agendas of Olympic-related coverage by Chinese and Japanese mainstream media during the Beijing Winter Olympics and the agenda-setting relationship between the agendas of the two countries in terms of issues and emotional attributes through a time-lag intersection analysis.The study hopes that through the investigation of the above issues,we can better understand the agenda content of the Winter Olympics and the performance of China’s external agenda setting by the mainstream media of both countries,and provide references and suggestions for China’s external coverage of similar large-scale sports events in the future.The results of the study found that although the Chinese mainstream media were able to set the agenda of the Japanese mainstream media in their coverage of the Olympic Games,there were differences in the content of the issues between the two countries at different stages of the Winter Olympics,with the Japanese mainstream media paying more attention to the Olympic issues and China showing a tendency of "New Worldism" in setting issues,actively setting economic,environment and other non-Olympic issues.In terms of emotional attributes,Chinese media can also set the emotional attributes of Japanese mainstream media’s Olympic-related reports,but there is a negative correlation between the two,which means the positive output of Chinese media causes antipathy of Japanese media.