A Study Of The U.S.Mainstream Media’s Coverage Of The Beijing Winter Olympics From The Perspective Of International News Domestication

As one of the most important and complex bilateral relations in the world,the development and changes in Sino-US relations have become an important dependent variable affecting China’s development and future changes in the world order.The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics,as one of China’s largest home diplomatic events in recent years,has become an important window to explain China’s political,economic,cultural,and social development,while also showing and influencing Sino-U.S.relations.This paper applies the theory of news domestication to analyze the coverage of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics by four U.S.mainstream media,namely the New York Times,CNN,the Washington Times and Fox News,in the context of U.S.-China relations,in an attempt to gain a glimpse of the international political discourse competition and the coverage strategies of the U.S.towards China from their international communication and news domestication of the Winter Olympics.The study finds that the four media have some commonalities in their domestication approaches,but also present significant differences depending on the time stage,coverage topics,and media organization.They jointly constructed a politicized Olympic Games,and the most critical influencing factors were national interests and ideological differences.The repositioning has become the basic guideline for the strategies adopted by the media,and the political,economic,security,and diplomatic policy foundations have shaped the commonality in the approach to domestication.In addition,the increasingly polarized political ecology within the United States,the rise of partisan media,and the nature of media organizations and market positioning have also shaped the differences in the approaches.Based on the above analysis,this paper further summarizes the characteristics of the U.S.media coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics,and proposes countermeasures on how to deal with the challenges and improve China’s foreign communication capacity.