How China’s flagship news program frames “the West”: Foreign news coverage of CCTV’s Xinwen Lianbo before and during Xi Jinping’s presidency

Abstract

This study investigates how Xinwen Lianbo, a prestigious TV news program and a key propaganda tool of the Chinese Communist Party, framed a bloc of Western countries in its foreign news coverage in the period 2010-2015. The results of the content analysis performed in this study revealed that mixed and diverse images of the West were portrayed by the program. Interestingly, significantly more negative frames of these countries were identified after Xi Jinping took office in late 2012, which signaled a pivotal event in terms of China's foreign policy. However, Xi's speech to Chinese media workers on 19 August 2013 did not have additional effects on the program's framing of the West.

Two nations in three worlds? Images of the US and China in ethnic, homeland, and host media

“…Specifically, as Sino-US relations get tense and Chinese public opinion about the US grows increasingly unfavourable (Pew Research Center, 2014), mainstream Chinese media are likely to portray the US in a negative light. This is empirically supported by Zhang and Boukes’s (2019) study, which showed an increased number of negative frames in Xinwen Lianbo’s (a mainstream TV news programme in China) coverage of US-led Western nations since 2013. According to another study conducted by He et al (2012), one predominant image of the United States in the Chinese press is a ‘struggle camel’ that undergoes a recession.…”

State News Agency Frames on Terrorist Attack : Study in TVNZ New Zealand and news.lk Sri Lanka

“…These findings quite similar to previous research and literature that explains the function of state news agencies is to deliver government political messages domestically and globally, to maintain the country's national interest. State news agency content is being influenced by government policy, so that the coverage will support the government's interest (Du & Li, 2017;Primayanti, 2015;Rantanen et al, 2019;Watanabe, 2017;Zhang & Boukes, 2019). In terrorism, the state news agency will never cover the news or statement from the group/person whose claiming responsibility for the terrorism act (Junaedi, 2017), it makes the objectivity become the rare things in terrorism news (Sukarno, 2011) The target audiences also influences the state news agency news frame (Satriani, 2018).…”

“…The research held between 2010 -2015 shows the balance of positive tone and negative tone in CCTV news about Western countries. Since Xi Jinping becomes the China president in 2012, the tone about Western countries become more negative, because Xi Jinping's foreign policy is more critical to the Western country (Zhang & Boukes, 2019).…”

Framing international news in China: An analysis of trans-edited news in Chinese newspapers

“…We collected all of the trans-edited international news stories published in the two newspapers between October and December 2014. We chose this period of time because the years of 2013–2014 signified the transition of international news reporting of non-party newspapers like SMD from flourishing to shrinking as indicated by Lai (2015), which was considered as part of the Party-state’s increasing influences on the news media after President Xi Jinping assumed office in late 2012 (Brady, 2017; X. Zhang & Boukes, 2019).…”