Foreign Media News Effects

Since Qing Dynasty, foreign media have never stopped diffusing their content in China. As many influential foreign media provide digital news in Chinese language, Chinese audience has never been exposed to foreign media news as conveniently as they are today. However, scholars in communication studies have rarely paid attention to the effects of foreign media news in Chinese language on Chinese audience. Some political scientists notice the effects of media on political trust, but nearly none of them have paid attention to the effects of foreign media new on political trust.This dissertation investigates the effects of foreign media coverage of China’s anti-corruption campaign in Chinese language on the political trust of college students. Based on the Expectancy-value Model and Framing Theory, this dissertation proposes its major research hypotheses as follows:compared with the control group, exposure to strategy frame lowers political trust, exposure to issue frame elevates political trust; individuals exposed to strategy frame tend to have lower political trust than individuals exposed to issue frame. Besides testing these hypotheses, this dissertation also explores the effects of media source, political knowledge and authoritarianism on the framing effects.With a control group as the baseline, using a 2(foreign source v.s. domestic source) X 2(strategy frame v.s. issue frame) between-subject posttest-only design, 267 student subjects participate in the experiment. Results show that compared with the control group, whether it is from domestic source or foreign source, strategy frame significantly lowers incumbent-based trust, while issue frame does not significantly elevate incumbent-based trust.When news is from foreign media, individuals exposed to strategy frame have significantly lower incumbent-based trust than individuals exposed to issue frame. When news is from domestic media, exposure to strategy frame or issue frame does not produce any significant differences in incumbent-based trust. Less knowledgeable individuals exposed to strategy frame from domestic source tend to have lower incumbent-based trust than their counterparts in the control group. Individuals with weak authoritarianism exposed to strategy frame from domestic source tend to have a lower regime-based trust than their counterparts exposed to strategy frame from foreign source, and tend to have lower incumbent-based trust than their counterparts exposed to issue frame from domestic source. Individuals with strong authoritarianism exposed to issue frame from foreign source tend to have higher incumbent-based trust than their counterparts exposed to issue frame from domestic source.In light of those findings, this dissertation suggests that government strengthen and improve the regulation of foreign media, regulate the republication of foreign media news by China’s media and web, and maintain and improve the positive publicity. The limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are discussed in the final chapter.