A Comparative Study of International Reports on COVID-19—Taking China Daily and the New York Times as Examples

Abstract

With the changing of times and the rapid development of science and technology, the world is faced with global information. And the access to information becomes very important, especially in such special times as epidemic crisis. The media in every country are quickly gathering information to spread news internationally, which should be paid great attention to, for they are the focuses of the world, and the events in the news relate to the image of a country. However, every country has its own national condition, which naturally decides the differences existing in their media reports. China Daily and the New York Times are selected as research subjects, with chosen news ranging from February 2020 to May 2020. China Daily is the major media for foreign publicity in China, while the New York Times is also famous since the United States is the representative of the West. This paper explores international news on COVID-19 of the above two media to understand their differences and find out the reasons. In this paper, the content analysis method is adopted to extract part of international news for qualitative analysis. The ultimate goal of the comparative study is to improve China’s external publicity capacity.