The Internet’s cold war: an analysis of Chinese and US framing and agenda-setting in online media

Abstract

With the current state of US-China relations being described by Naqvi (2022), writing in The National Interest, as a “Cold War 2.0”, in a time when the world is still in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic and is now watching war unfold in Europe with the invasion of Ukraine, what people see in the news in such turbulent times is very important. While previous research by Sadri (2015), Wu (2021) and Gao and Liang (2007) has looked at, respectively, US, US/China and Chinese coverage of global events, this research aims to analyse a number of techniques in media, namely Agenda-Setting, Framing (and Tone within this), across two different major world topics, namely Covid-19 (specifically vaccines) and Ukraine, and why this is occurring in given the geopolitical context. This thesis utilised Content Analysis, along with qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis, to investigate the differences between the US and Chinese media. Two US news outlets, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, along with two Chinese sources, the People’s Daily and China Daily were chosen, and then 21 articles per source were selected that mentioned “vaccine” and “Ukraine” (totalling 168 articles), over the course of a 21 day time period, and then run through the Antconc online corpus software. Using this, it was then able to be determined what agenda attributes were made the most salient, and then using the Policy Frames Guidebook developed by Boydstun et.al., (2014) and used by Sadri (2015), the framing of the attributes could be done. Before this, the articles themselves were tallied in comparison to the total article count published by each source within that time frame, in order to see how much “Ukraine” or “Vaccine” was in the media. Finally the tone was analysed using Sentiment Mining software (Megellan OpenText) in order to highlight the positive, negative or neutral nature of the articles. What was found is that Ukraine is far more salient in US media than Chinese, and Vaccines were slightly more salient in Chinese media than in the US. It was also found that the US makes the issues of war and invasion more prominent with Ukraine, and it is framed as a war on innocent people, while Chinese media focuses more on peace talks and frames it as a conflict, not as a war. For the vaccine-related articles, they were focussed on and framed more on international relations in Chinese articles, compared to the medical or personal side to those in the US sources. Finally, the tone was found to be more negative in the US sources for Ukraine, with Chinese ones being neutral, and for vaccines, China’s being overwhelmingly positive, and the US being largely negative.