Abstract
This study examines agenda-setting in US-China elite newspapers coverage of COVID-19 through topic modeling. It attempts to contribute to studies of media agenda first by demonstrating the relevance of text-mining in agenda-setting research and second by comparing how elite newspapers from different countries choose topics as part of agenda-setting when they report a single event. Topic-modeling the news corpora collected between 15 January 2020 and 15 June 2020 from the four US-China elite newspapers, the study finds that “domestic economy” and “international relations” are the two dominant topics that help shape the agenda in the Chinese newspapers, whereas “family & friends” and “daily life” are the topics playing the same role in the US newspapers. The study argues that such differences may associate with ideological gaps between the two countries in terms of “concepts of development”, “media bias” and “views of individualism”.
Highlights
The present research investigates how elite newspapers in US and China choose their topics as part of agenda-setting when reporting COVID-19 with topic modeling, a text-mining technique for automatic retrieval of latent topics in a corpus (Murakami, 2017, p. 243)
This may partly point to the agenda-setting patterns between the US-China newspapers as they report COVID-19
As a text-mining technique that detects latent topics in a large amount of language data, topic modeling could be a useful tool for agenda-setting research
Summary
The present research investigates how elite newspapers in US and China choose their topics as part of agenda-setting when reporting COVID-19 with topic modeling, a text-mining technique for automatic retrieval of latent topics in a corpus (Murakami, 2017, p. 243). Of those infected countries around the globe These impacts, together with the pandemic itself, are exploited by world media and have become a recurring theme in their pandemic reports. To make the situation more complex, USChina conflicts in trade and politics over the past years seem to fuel the media bias in the two countries as they cover the pandemic in each other’s territories. This is likely to intensify such difference in the agendasetting, making it scholarly noteworthy. Finding out such difference is the motivation of this work and where topic modeling as a methodological choice cuts in
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