A Comparative Study On The Coverage Of Diaoyu Islands In China Daily And The New York Times

The year of2012was meant to celebrate the40th anniversary ofnormalization of Sino-Japan diplomatic relations, but it stirred up astorm in a teacup after Shintaro Ishihara, Japan’s Tokyo governor,announced to “purchase” three islets of the Diaoyu Islands, which areChina’s indisputable territory according to China’s part. The sea disputessurged since then. And Diaoyu Islands became hot topic in Chinese andAmerican mainstream media, such as China Daily and The New YorkTimes. To find out the frames that these two newspapers had utilized toreport the event and its ongoing development, the differences of framesbetween two newspapers if there were any, this study sampled newsstories on “Diaoyu Islands” from April2,2012to September30,2012inChina Daily and The New York Times as research subjects, applyingframing theory and using content analysis as the research method. To bemore specific, this thesis used the following six categories including:number of stories, news resource, story length, story types, story frameand favorability. It concluded that these two newspapers had significantdifferences in these six categories. Among the122news stories in ChinaDaily,56stories written in type of feature within800words whileamong all the35stories of The New York Times,18stories were alsowritten in style of feature to discuss the disputes deeply, with the story length of more than800words ranking the first place. In terms of newssource, The New York Times had a more balanced source choicecompared with China Daily, which mainly took sources from Chinesepart. Regarding the specific six frames in the paper, two newspapers had“the development of the dispute” and “Sino-Japan relations” as priorityto cover the disputes. In terms of favorability, China Daily was pro-China with great momentum while The New York Times was obviouslypro-Japan even though they stove to demonstrate the independence andneutrality of journalism.