When Socialism Meets Terrorism: A Computer-Assisted Discursive News Values Analysis of Chinese Newspapers’ Coverage of Domestic and International Terrorist Attacks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Terrorist attacks, as a particular type of negative social event, are a potential threat to the establishment of a “Socialist Harmonious Society” advocated by the Chinese government. To shed light on how Chinese journalists construct reports on terrorist attacks and, more broadly, how non-Western countries report on negative social issues, we compared newspaper coverage of one domestic attack with four international incidents. Starting from Bednarek and Caple’s framework, we further developed the computer-assisted Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) they proposed by adapting individual definitions of news values and dividing them into 15 subcategories to suit the Chinese context, the topic of terrorism, and the automatic processing of large-scale datasets. Based on our understanding, we developed an open-source list of Chinese lexical indicators by Part of Speech tagging, sentiment, collocation, and concordance analysis, with a view to providing resources to support future quantitative DNVA. Following this approach, we found that while market factors enabled Chinese newspapers to cover domestic terrorist attacks, media adopted specific media strategies to meet political needs, which differed from those used to cover international attacks. These different media strategies can be explained by the Chinese developmentalist ideology and harmonious cultural traditions.