| At the Beijing Winter Olympics held in February 2022,Eileen Gu,a naturalized Chinese female freestyle skier,competed in three events: big air,slopestyle and halfpie,and achieved two golds and one silver,creating a history of Chinese skiing.The "Eileen Gu effect" exploded all over the world,Gu became the focus of Chinese media coverage,and also attracted the eyes of the media around the world.In order to avoid the subjective and praiseworthy content and judgments created by some domestic media,this study hopes to explore the construction of Eileen Gu’s image in the media of her country of origin,the United States,in order to make the media image of Gu and the related international communication of China more objective,realistic,comprehensive and complete.The study selected the websites of USA TODAY,CNN,and ESPN,the three major American comprehensive and sports media,as the sample for the study,and searched for the pre-defined keyword Eileen Gu in the news search section of each website.All the articles were collected to form the corpus needed for this study.With the help of the corpus analysis software,we analyzed the high-frequency words,their collocations and emotional tendencies that appeared in the text of the report,and then analyzed the media from the three dimensions of media: media institutions,texts and audiences feedback,and made a comprehensive judgment of the retrieved content.The results of the study show that all three U.S.media contents devoted a significant amount of coverage to Eileen Gu’s performance at the field,portraying her as an elite athlete who is healthy,sunny,energetic and competitive on the ski slopes.There was also a lot of coverage of Gu off the field,attending business endorsements,as well as a few clips of Gu being interviewed and giving speeches.Off the field,Eileen Gu is confident,beautiful,generous,and has a strong sense of social responsibility and mission.However,the study also found that some of the reports questioned Gus current nationality,identity,and naturalization purposes,demonstrating the "othering" of Eileen Gu’s image by these American media,and the priority of discourse that they often hope to achieve in their coverage of China-related topics,as well as the cultural divide that currently exists between China and the United States,and the Eastern and Western worlds.In this regard,Chinese mainstream media should start from the new situation,actively improve and perfect the top-level design of media,and construct a world-oriented and future-oriented media layout structure during international communication.At the same time,they should strive to improve the professionalism of journalists and the quality of reporting content,use multiple communication methods with the support of new high-tech communication technology,and seek innovative development of media integration,so that the character of Eileen Gu can become more abundant and threedimensional.In the specific storytelling,the vivid details of Gu’s growth process between China and the U.S.should be fully explored to evoke the memory of Sino-American sympathy and play the role of cultural bridge of typical characters.Finally,it is necessary to enhance the audience’s interactive awareness and pay attention to the feedback of the audience’s immediate opinions in order to better eliminate misunderstandings,enhance the objectivity of the report content and realize the communication effect. |
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