The Research Of China And America National Image On English News Websites

With the establishment of second economy status in the world, China has beenfaced with more severe situation abroad. Particularly on the background of ‘ChinaThreat Theory’, how to build national image kindly and how to deliver realChina-story to the world become a critical issue for Chinese government. Moreover,relying on its absolute advantage in economy, military, culture and language fields,America has dominated international consensus for a long time. Thus, due to seriousdifference on ideology, history and culture, majority of western media tried to distortor even demonize Chinese image and hinder external communication. Recently,following rapid development and dissemination of technology, digital media hasreplaced traditional media due to its unique advantages like wide-spread,high-interaction, sensory stimuli and real-time and become important approach forindividuals to get information. Hence, this trend brought negative impact onnewspaper industry globally, for instance, newspaper sales volume decreased sharply,some newspaper enterprises went bankrupt. Moreover, paper-version newspaper wascanceled in some cases. On this condition, big newspaper giants in developed countrydigitalized themselves, like New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today.In this paper, writer targets two representative English digital media fromAmerica and China respectively: Washington Post website and China Daily website.By applying content analysis, inductive contrast method and case study approach,writer conducts systematical analysis and comparison based on data collection fromAlexa. Through analyzing some categories like traffic ranking, daily visits, page-viewtime, audience background of these two websites, the difference and basic situationinformation are exposed.Additionally, this paper also release the description difference and why thesedifferences occurs based on some significant incidents analysis like South China Seadispute, Hurricane Sandy and Beijing downpour. From comprehensive insight afteranalysis, it could be easily concluded that similar incident has been reported differently. Washington Post website prefers analyzing one case from several aspectsaiming to offer readers a comprehensive consideration. On the contrary, China Dailywebsite is good at building high country image for China instead of exposing bigchallenges and difficulties that China are facing and digging out some reasons leadingserious social problems on the basis of excellent resources.By contrast analysis of these two websites, this paper concludes how Americamedia establish national image so that better strategies and methods could berecommended for China for its future development.