| Since the outbreak of COVID-19,mask has become the focus of the media coverage both in China and United States.Conflicts and games have always been existing in terms of prevention and control measurements for COVID-19.In particular,the solidarity,efficiency,and sincere coordination shown by China society during the process of fighting against the epidemic are significantly different from those of the United States,which is mired in rivalry between political parties and racial divisions.Based on framing theory,this thesis uses content analysis and LDA semantic processing model of unsupervised machine learning method Innovatively to compare3,897 news reports related to masks of People’s Daily and the New York Times from January 20,2020 to December 31,2020.In terms of reporting frames,China pays more attention to the action frames for policy implementation,focusing particularly on whether the policies are effectively implemented in various regions.While the U.S.highlights political conflicts and is more concerned on the necessity of policies implementation.The most similar frame is the medical frames.For subject selection,People’s Daily highlights "Good Chinese people" and "Collective heroes" under epidemic fighting.However,the New York Times focuses on individual stories and stresses the diversity.Besides,reports in People’s Daily are more positive and conciliatory while those of the Times are negative,uncontrollable and uncertainty.On the whole,People’s Daily shows the dual concentration of themes and subjects,whereas the Times focuses on the multiple differences of individuals and themes.As for research method,after reading and coding,the thesis finds that the numbers of mask(s)reports in China and America are both affected by the severity degree of epidemic.Moreover,different mask policies by different leaders affected reports amount in the Times.With LDA topic model,six categories of topics with a more prominent probability are found among thousands of reports.Meanwhile,all reports can be extracted to six categories and their keywords are used in generating lexical matrix network.We also complete the whole procedure in text data from social media,after that we observe frames in report have impacts on netizen opinions.In respect to conclusions,reasons for the differences between China and America are analyzed from following aspects.Firstly,there exist the cognitive divisions in whether surgical masks can prevent the spread of COVID-19.Secondly,socio-cultural differences such as the historical meaning of "mask",the symbolization,stigmatization and politicization of masks,social disease history,etc.lead to various report frames.Thirdly,China and American are classified as collectivism and individualism culture type,hence social practices in egoism and altruism can trigger differences.Fourthly,China and America have built their own communities through the selecting of reports subjects and the shaping of social norms.As such,China gathers collective power through labelling the groups and collective ceremony,whereas the American media "draw invisible boundaries" for different groups of society in the name of freedom and divergence,magnifying differences and ignoring universality. |
