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 DOI: 10.1177/1748048508094293

2008 70: 361International Communication GazetteZengjun Peng

Newspaper Coverage in Three CountriesFraming the Anti-War Protests in the Global Village : A Comparative Study of

  

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FRAMING THE ANTI-WAR PROTESTS IN THEGLOBAL VILLAGEA Comparative Study of Newspaper Coverage in Three Countries

Zengjun Peng

Abstract / This study compared newspaper coverage of anti-war protests in three countries basedon the theoretical framework of framing. News stories in The New York Times, The Times and thePeople’s Daily over a period of six months were analyzed in terms of news selection, prominence,sourcing pattern, frames, themes and overall favorability toward the protestors. Results show signifi-cant differences not only in coverage between contrasting media systems (US and Britain vs China),but also between comparable media systems (US vs Britain). Reasons for these differences andtheoretical implications are explored.

Keywords / communication / international / journalism / news media / protest / war coverage

Mobilizing popular support for national purposes has proved a dramatic and valuableillustration of force (Ginsberg, 1986). Among others, social demonstrations providethe arena for the showdown of various political forces and the building-up of publicopinion. During the process, the role of the news media is crucial in generating andshaping public opinions on issues of critical national importance.

The US-led second war in Iraq is a global-village happening shared not only bythe belligerent nations but also by the entire world regardless of race, nationalityand political and ideological differences. New communication technologies havemade it possible to transport images and words about the war to millions of peoplein the world, who, pro- or anti-war, have experienced the conception, the build-up,the climax and the finale of a war far away from home. Amid the trumpets anddrums of the war marches, there were also public outcries struggling to be heard– the anti-war protests staged throughout the world. However, how these anti-warprotests were covered and framed was at the mercy of the mainstream news media,which defined the war largely in line with the media systems of which they were apart. News media in different political, economic and cultural systems might showgreat diversity in news selection, prominence given, frames applied and attitudestoward the protests.

Examining media coverage of the anti-war protests in the international contextmay provide new perspectives for understanding the news media performance under

The International Communication Gazette

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LOS ANGELES, LONDON, NEW DELHI, SINGAPORE AND WASHINGTON DC 1748-0485 VOL. 70(5): 361–377

DOI: 10.1177/1748048508094293

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different media systems. Comparison and contrasts may offer more revealing evidenceand consequently stronger empirical power that might be limited or missing whenstudying media coverage within a single country.

This study compared the anti-war coverage by content-analyzing three nationalnewspapers in three countries, namely, The New York Times of the US, The Timesof Britain and the People’s Daily of China. Characteristics of coverage, includingdimensions on news story type, prominence of news story, news frames, themesand favorability toward the protestors were analyzed, similarities and differenceswere compared and implications discussed.

Literature Review

Many scholars have stressed the importance of the mass media in shaping publicperception and framing movements and movement issues (Gamson and Modigliani,1989; Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 1980). Most of them have agreed that the mass mediaoften displayed a status quo bias and tended to marginalize and delegitimize socialand political deviants (Hall, 1982; Hall et al., 1981), which is believed to be largelya result of the hegemonic nature of the mass media (Herman and Chomsky, 1988).

Smith et al. (2001), in their study of media coverage of protest, summarized thatthe mainstream media displayed two basic biases in protest coverage: selection biasand description bias. They argued that social movement organizations are by defi-nition ‘outsiders’ to political institutions and processes, and they can be furthermarginalized when mainstream media fail to cover their protests or the issues theyseek to raise. Selection bias means that the media agenda can influence the selec-tion of protest events that are reported, independent of the characteristics of theevent as such. Description bias means that protest activities or organizers are oftenportrayed in a manner that reporters believe will appeal to their mass audience(Gitlin, 1980).

Framing analysis has been widely used in examining media coverage of warand social protests. The theoretical constructs developed by media scholars (Entman,1993; Gamson, 1989; Gitlin, 1980; Goffman, 1974) are particularly meshed withthis study. In applying framing analysis, this study followed the ideas of selection,emphasis and salience explicated in the definition by Entman (1993: 52): ‘To frameis to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in acommunicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition,causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and /or treatment recommendation for theitem described.’

Selection and Salience

Gitlin (1980: 6) stated that frames are ‘principles of selection, emphasis, and presen-tation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and whatmatters’. Therefore, framing, first of all, is a process of inclusion and exclusion, andto a large extent, what has been excluded out of the frame might be more revealingof news media bias. Many studies have recorded such orientation in the American

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news media in the selection of news (Entman, 1993; Gitlin, 1980; Tankard et al.,1991). For example, the first Gulf War was widely opposed in Japan, Spain and NorthAfrican cities, but little of this was covered in the US media (Mowlana, 1992).

Even if the news stories make their way through the gatekeeping process, thereis still the issue of how much attention was allocated to them. Entman (1991) arguedthat salience is entirely about ‘sizing’, making some aspects of a message ‘bigger’and others ‘smaller’. For example, the physical space devoted to an element of aparticular story in a print news medium frames the story in such a way that elementstaking more space will be more influential in the readers’ interpretation of the story.Conferring to the argument, Pan and Kosicki (1993) stated that the salient cues geta greater allocation of an individual’s cognitive resources.

Sources

Most of the media biases and orientation of frames have been attributed to the influ-ence of the sources. Studies (Fishman, 1980; Paletz and Entman, 1993) found thatthe news media rely heavily on the official sources for not only information but alsodefinitions of the protest situation. McLeod and Hertog (1992, 1998) explained thatjournalists rely on official sources to add prestige to the story, to increase theefficiency of news production and to maintain the illusion of objectivity.

Sources play an important role in the framing process of the news media, particu-larly when the source is powerful and with control of information flow (McQuail,1992). Entman (1993) argued that in breaking news, the initial interactions betweensources and journalists initiate the framing process. To some extent, source is thestory. Gitlin (1980) and Tuchman (1978) argued that the production of frames wasthe result of media routines and the way those routines facilitated certain sources,therefore allowing these sources to influence media frames. Wanta (1997) foundthat sources of a news story determine the basic nature of the story and influencethe flow of information through the media. Iyengar and Kinder (1987) explainedthat news frames reflect and sustain traditional values in such a way that reflectand sustain the official view, leaving much of the task of defining what news is toofficials.

Frames and Themes

Reese and Buckaley (1995: 47), in their study of local news coverage of policy supportand dissent, stated that the media used frames to ‘manage dissent and constructa coherent body of coverage supportive of administration policy’. They argued thatthe same event could be covered in different news frames. For instance, a protestevent can be framed as a conflict between the protestors, and the police or theopponents. Similarly, a news story can frame the protest into deviant actions char-acterized by incidence of violence and vandalism.

Protests and social movements are generally the demonstration of dissident viewsand opinions on issues and policies. The protestors often use slogans, banners andstickers to express their criticism of policies and to state their positions. However,

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what they try to convey to the public is likely to be distorted by the framing ofthe news media. For instance, Reese and Buckaley (1995) identified rhetorical biasesof the media in presenting the themes of the protesters. By presenting or givingemphasis on certain themes, the news media can frame the protests in such a wayas to trivialize and marginalize the protesters. Such frames are often achieved by arhetorical transformation. Reese and Buckaley found that one common rhetoricaltransformation was from ‘pro-war’ to ‘pro-troops’, and ‘anti-Bush’ was rendered asanti-government, and further, unpatriotic; statements about one’s support for theattack on Iraq became statements about ‘supporting the troops’. The two conceptsbecame essentially indistinguishable, and went to the extent that to say one wasagainst the war was to say that one did not support the troops. To support thetroops and the war was patriotism, while to oppose them was unpatriotic. Reeseand Buckaley argued that, through many examples, news frames defined the termsof the debate, thus limiting the terms of the debate itself.

War Coverage in International Context

The war in Iraq is an event of international consequences. With political and economicglobalization, the world is becoming smaller than ever before. Information tech-nology forces nations to share the consequences of each other’s actions, bringingthe world within McLuhan’s vision of a global village (Merrill and Friedlander, 1994).

Many studies of international news media coverage have mostly dwelled onthe theoretical framework of the political economy, stressing the role and functionof the media in critical moments of national interests. The dominant thesis is newsmedia in a particular country will be generally supportive of the host country’s nationalpolicies, and an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomous mentality guides their coverage of inter-national conflicts out of political and economic reasons (Chomsky, 1992; Hermanand Chomsky, 1988; Mowlana, 1992). Government control of or influence over thenews media is the key. National interests often suppress some of the fundamentalvalues of journalism, and the basic assumptions underlying the normative presstheories as represented by the Four Theories of the Press (Siebert et al., 1956), suchas the freedom of the press, become largely irrelevant. For instance, scholars arguedthat even though the American press lectured the world on the virtues of a freepress, and the necessity of avoiding governmental domination of the informationalsystem, in reality, ‘the United States, with its enormous media system operating withthe state-of-the-art technologies, has been as closed as a society could be to infor-mation, facts, and opinion which in the slightest challenged the national war policy’(Schiller, 1992: 23). In terms of global news flow, there is the long-time concern ofthe hegemony of the western news media. The central argument is that westernnews media, with their economic power and advanced communication technology,have basically dominated the news flow, and shaped the orientation of world newscoverage of international events. These basic theoretical premises suggest that, onthe one hand, news media in specific countries are restricted by the particular politi-cal and ideological environment, and inevitably result in the different coverage inline with their government policies and national interests; on the other hand, the

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dominance of the western news media in the world information order may also setthe agenda and frames for the coverage, one of the direct consequences being thehomogeneity in news coverage.

Results in previous comparative studies have verified the idea that media in differ-ent countries show distinctive features in their coverage of the same events, and therewere just as many differences as similarities in the news framing process. For instance,in their seven-country comparison of television news coverage of the beginning ofthe Gulf War, Swanson and Smith (1993) found that all the newscasts were organ-ized in a similar format and similar narrative story forms, relying on officials as theauthoritative sources of information and interpretive frames. However, they alsofound important differences between the newscasts, particularly those contentelements that contributed directly to each service’s overall narrative construction ofthe meaning of the war and the abilities and motivations of the antagonists. Forinstance, they discovered clear differences in the pro-coalition narratives and the anti-coalition narratives. Anti-coalition narratives constructed ‘world opinion’, featuringboth government leaders and civilian groups as virtually unified in opposition to thecoalition’s actions. Anti-war demonstrations around the world were covered at lengthand given much significance. Pro-coalition narratives gave less attention to ‘worldopinion’, concentrating more on expressions of opinion in the combatant countries.Anti-war demonstrations were reported, but typically in a context that made clearthe majority support for coalition policy.

A number of studies have explored the first Iraq War coverage in specificcountries, focusing on both the distinctive features and the influence of the westernnews media. For instance, Sainath (1992) discussed the dilemma of the Indian pressduring the first Gulf War in catering to anti-war public mood, and the inadequacyto compete with and resist the framing effect of western media such as CNN. Sainathfound that the Indian press was so influenced by the American news media agendathat ‘even some of the anti-war arguments were based on traditional westernpremises’ (Sainath, 1992: 73). Nain (1992: 83), in examining the relationship betweenthe state, the Malaysian press and the war, concluded that ‘Malaysian mainstreampress, preoccupied as they were with toeing the official line, reflected in a totalabsence of criticism or questioning of the government stand and the role of theUnited Nations’. Other individual country studies, such as Japan (Naito, 1992), Turkey(Sabin, 1992), Iran (Motamed-Nejad et al., 1992) and western European countries(Corcoran, 1992), came up with similar results.

American, British and Chinese News Media

The dominant press system theory based on the Four Theories of the Press (Siebertet al., 1956) places the American and British media systems and the Chinese mediasystem at opposite poles of the press model continuum, with the former two asmodels of the libertarian press and the latter as the totalitarian Communist model.Presumably, the American and British news media would display similarities in theirmedia coverage in sharp contrast with the Chinese news media. However, previousstudies have suggested that although the British and American news media share

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identical cultural, philosophical and political roots, they also show many differencesin news values and news presentation. For instance, Hopple (1982) found interest-ing differences in terms of their gatekeeping habits and their news selection processbetween The New York Times and the Manchester Times. Winfield et al. (2002), ina comparative study of the British and American media’s coverage of 9/11, foundthat journalists in the US and Britain displayed different patterns in using history topresent the event.

In discussing news-framing routines, Gamson and Modigliani (1989) arguedthat there are three determinants of news frames: cultural resonance, sponsor enter-prise and media organization and practice. This suggests that different newsroomculture and practices between the American and British news media may result indifferent frames in their coverage of news events. After all, it is news practitionerswho determine which news is selected, excluded, elaborated and emphasized(Entman, 1993; Gamson, 1989; Gitlin, 1980; Tankard et al., 1991). Although jour-nalists may share some news values such as objectivity, ‘objective news does notimply that news is politically neutral’ (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987: 132). No news-gathering and reporting system is fundamentally non-ideological, apolitical andnon-partisan, and, therefore, the differences in news coverage are almost a self-evident fact (McQuail, 1992).

The Chinese news media are still under tight government control, despite recentyears’ dramatic political and economic changes and the ongoing commercializationof the press (Huang, 2003; Lee, 2000; Winfield and Peng, 2005; Zhao, 1998). Thepress remains the mouthpiece of the government. Particularly in international newsreporting, the Chinese news media are closely tied to the Party and governmentline, echoing government foreign polices and orientation (Zhao, 1998). Althoughduring the second Iraq War, for strategic reasons, the Chinese government’s positionwas not as clear-cut and strong as other nations such as Russia, Germany and France,China’s opposition stance was salient. This would naturally set the agenda and framesfor the media coverage.

From the foregoing discussion, we may basically come to the following conclu-sions: (1) the news media play a crucial role in shaping public perception and opinionsabout the war; (2) the news media’s coverage of war is greatly tied with nationalinterests and government policies; and (3) the news media in different press systemsmay display distinctive features in their coverage.

Based on the literature discussed here, we have reasons to expect (1) signifi-cant differences between the coverage of anti-war protests in the American, Britishand the Chinese news media; (2) significant similarities between the American andBritish news media in overall anti-war protest coverage; and (3) significant differencesbetween the American and British news media in their specific ways of coverage.Therefore, we propose the following research questions and hypotheses, respectivelytapping different aspects of news framing, including distribution patterns, types ofstories, sources used, frames and themes presented, as well as general evaluativeorientation of the news frames toward the protests and the protestors.

RQ1: What are the general characteristics regarding anti-war protest coveragein the three newspapers?

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RQ2: Are there any differences between The New York Times, The Times andthe People’s Daily in terms of specific themes in the utterances of the protestors intheir coverage.

H1: There will be significant differences between The New York Times and TheTimes and the People’s Daily in terms of sources used.

H2: There will be significant differences between The New York Times and TheTimes and the People’s Daily in terms of favorability toward the protestors.

H3: There will be significant differences between The New York Times and TheTimes and the People’s Daily in terms of general event frames (legitimate protests,conflict between police and protesters and social deviants).

Method

Sampling

This study used one American newspaper, The New York Times, one British, TheTimes, and one Chinese, the People’s Daily, as representative of newspaper coveragein the three countries. These three newspapers were chosen because they are gener-ally seen as the most important national newspapers in their home country. Theircontent influences other newspapers, wire services, news magazines and televisionand radio news, and has a big impact on public opinion. In the case of The NewYork Times, it is generally believed that it not only sets the agenda for other USnews media but also exerts strong influences on American leaders and US foreignpolicies. The same is true for The Times. The People’s Daily is the official paper ofthe Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. It not only reflects Partyand government policies but also sets the tune for Chinese news media in mattersof great importance such as foreign policy. In addition, these three newspapers arecomparable in terms of prominence, influence, content and, relatively, format.

Stories published by The New York Times and The Times were accessed by akey word search (protest or demonstration and war or anti-war) from the LexisNexisdatabase. All news stories on anti-war protests were selected during the time framefrom 10 October 2002, when the US Congress adopted a joint resolution author-izing the use of force against Iraq, to 10 April 2003, when the allied forces claimedBaghdad.

Because the People’s Daily is not available in LexisNexis, the news stories wereaccessed by a key word search (protest or demonstration and war or anti-war) in itsonline database (in Chinese). The same time frame was applied.

Sampling Validity

Although the use of online databases is fairly common for retrieving newspaperitems, there is often the risk of sampling errors caused by: (1) the problems of notall editions of a newspaper being included in the database and (2) the problem ofsemantic validity. These problems may lead to two common errors: the error ofomission (the exclusion of relevant content items) and the error of commission (the

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inclusion of irrelevant content items). To address these concerns, a presampling testwas conducted. For the two western newspapers: first, articles of one randomlyselected week for each of the newspapers were retrieved from LexisNexis. Second,articles of the same week were recorded from the microfilmed newspaper archives.An adapted precision test method initiated by Yanovitzky and Bennett (1999) wasused to measure the precision. That is, the number of relevant articles retrievedonline was divided by the number of articles of the same period recorded from themicrofilm archive. The results showed a high precision (precision = .98 for The NewYork Times, and precision = .99 for The Times). For the Chinese newspaper, theauthor emailed headlines of the selected stories in one random week to a colleaguewho compared the results of reserved library copies in China. The precision was .97.

Coding Scheme

Coding Units

Single news item, source, frame and theme are respectively used as coding units inthis study. Single story is used as the coding unit for story type, location of event,prominence, general event frame and the overall favorability toward the protesters;source is used to code incidences of sources attributed in the news story; and frameand theme are used as the coding units for occurrences of frames and themesidentified in the text.

Story Type

Story type was coded as (1) episodic stories, i.e. hard, episodic event stories on theanti-war protests per se, including marches, sit-ins, vigils, etc. or (2) issue-orientedstories, namely stories of protests that emphasize issues, context and the impact ofthe protests, or, even though the story was initiated by a particular event, where theevent was used to introduce and explain issues rather than merely reporting on thehappening.

Sources

Source was applied to items quoted, paraphrased or attributed in a story. The sourcesincluded (1) official sources, i.e. institutional sources such as law enforcement andgovernments; (2) protesters, i.e. sources of people who directly participated in theprotests; and (3) outsiders: people, other than the official sources, who did not takepart in the protest per se.

Prominence

Prominence was measured by two variables: story length (number of words) andplacement: (1) front page, section one, (2) front page, other sections and (3) othersections. Scores ranging from 3 to 1 were assigned to each placement. Total scoreswere then averaged to produce a mean index.

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Event Location

Location referred to the places of protest events given in the story. They included:(1) domestic, (2) foreign and (3) multiple. Domestic or foreign is judged from theperspective of the home country of the specific newspaper. For instance, a protestin the US would be foreign in a British newspaper. Multiple means more than oneforeign or domestic locations were mentioned in the newspaper.

Event Frames

Event frames refer to the overall frames used to structure the story, often indicatedby the headlines, opening paragraphs and information and details dominant in thestory. Three types of event frames were included. (1) The protests were framed asa normal, legitimate social action, often indicated by referents such as peaceful,organized. (2) The protests were framed as a conflict between the protesters, thepolice and/or pro-war demonstrators: for example, a story headlined ‘Iraqi Exiles inAmerica Outnumbered by Arab Anti-War Protesters’. (3) The protests were largelydefined or described as deviant social actions involving incidences of vandalism: forexample: a story headlined ‘Protests: Flights Halted, Roads Blocked, and Flags Burnt’.The major difference between the first and third event frames is that the first ofteninvolves police action such as arrests while the third does not usually mention thepresence of police.

Themes

Theme refers to elements in the story such as slogans and utterances cited, oractions depicted in the news story that suggest themes of the specific protest. Threecategories are included: attack, position and acclaim.

Attacks refer to utterances or actions that criticize or humiliate the targets.Attacks were further grouped into two subthemes including (1) personal attack:criticism or attacks on the national leaders in the two countries, such as anti-Bushor anti-Blair attacks, e.g. ‘Drop Bush not Bombs!’, ‘Bush, the Murderer!’; and (2)policy attack, namely criticism or attacks toward government policy, e.g. ‘No Bloodfor Oil!’.

Position refers to utterances and actions showing attitudes and orientation. Thiscategory is divided into two groups: (1) pro-Iraq/Saddam Hussein, e.g. ‘Abdullah,Listen, Listen! Iraq Will Never Surrender!’ chanted by hundreds of protestors inAmman; and (2) anti-America/Americanism: utterances or actions attacking Americaas a country, or its people as a whole, e.g. ‘Death to America!’, ‘America does notwant freedom for the Iraqi people. It wants to install its puppets and subdueMuslims until we become a voice for America.’

Acclaim refers to slogans, utterances or actions making acclaims, defense orjustification for specific views and actions, e.g. ‘Peace is No War!’, ‘Peace is Patriot-ism!’, ‘Unjust War Should be Resisted’.

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Favorability toward the Protestors

Favorability refers to the overall tone of the news item. A five-point scale rangingfrom very unfavorable (1) to very favorable (5) is used to rate the favorability of thestory toward the protesters. For instance, a favorable story would be coded if itdenounced and criticized police actions, e.g. ‘Forty Injured as Police Fire RubberBullets at Peaceful Protestors’.

Coding and Intercoder Reliability

Two independent coders, both graduate students in journalism and fluent in Englishand Chinese, were involved in the coding. Training sessions were conducted, andcoding rules were discussed and agreed upon. Although scholars differ on theproportion of text for testing intercoder reliability, 10 percent or more seems to bea generally acceptable baseline (Riffe et al., 1998). For this study, it was decided torandomly take out 20 percent of the data to be coded by the two coders for testingintercoder reliability. Cohen’s kappa was used to calculate intercoder reliability. Theoverall reliability coefficient was .89. The reliability coefficient was .87 for story type,100 percent for categories of placement, event location, story length and sources,.79 for event frames and .76 for favorability. As it is a census sample, absolutenumbers and percentage distributions rather than statistical tests were used in thecomparison.

Results

A total of 115 stories (36 for The New York Times, 34 for The Times and 45 for thePeople’s Daily) were collected and analyzed. Their general distribution is presentedin Table 1.

RQ1 asked about general characteristics of the coverage in the three news-papers. From Table 1, we can see some interesting findings. First of all, the People’sDaily published more protest stories (a total of 45) than The New York Times (36)

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TABLE 1

Distribution Patterns (Numbers and Percentages) by Newspaper

Total Type of story Prominence Event location

Episodic Issue Plcm’t Length Domestic Foreign Multiple

index avg.

NYTimes 36 25 11 1.14 659 17 16 3

69% 31% 47% 44% 8%

Times 34 8 26 1.10 757 24 8 2

24% 76% 71% 24% 6%

People’s 45 28 17 1.34 464 0 24 21

Daily 62% 38% 0% 53% 47%

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and The Times (34), while the latter two were roughly identical. Given the fact thatthe People’s Daily published far fewer pages than either The New York Times or TheTimes in its daily editions, such differences in the total number of protest stories areremarkable.

In terms of type of stories, The Times published more issue stories (76 percent)than The New York Times (31 percent) and the People’s Daily (38 percent). In termsof placement of the news story, the People’s Daily scored 1.34, followed by TheNew York Times (1.14) and The Times (1.10). Again, considering the involvementof the US and Britain in the war, such a finding is somewhat unexpected. In termsof average story length, The Times (757 words) leads The New York Times (659)and the People’s Daily (464). In terms of event location, The Times seems moredomestically oriented than The New York Times, which published nearly twice asmany foreign pretest stories as The Times. In contrast, the People’s Daily publishedmore multiple location stories (47 percent).

RQ2 explores the differences in terms of themes contained in the protestors’utterance. Table 2 lists the distribution patterns.

Table 2 shows that The New York Times covers more personal attacks (16percent) than The Times (6 percent) and the People’s Daily (2 percent) while thePeople’s Daily’s coverage contains more attacks on the American war policies (75percent) than either The New York Times (43 percent) or The Times (42 percent). Interms of positions, there are more anti-American utterances by the protestors inThe New York Times (11 percent) than The Times (6 percent) or the People’s Daily(6 percent). When it comes to pro-Iraq utterances, there are more in The Times (9percent) and People’s Daily (8 percent) than the New York Times (5 percent). Acclaimwas coded to reflect the justifications for their actions by the protestors. In thiscategory, The Times led with a 33 percent, followed by The New York Times (26percent) and the People’s Daily (10 percent).

H1 stated that there would be significant differences between the three news-papers in terms of sources used in the coverage. Source patterns are presented inTable 3.

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TABLE 2

Themes by Newspaper

Total Attack Position Acclaim

Personal Policy Anti- Pro-Iraq

attack attack American

NYTimes 168 27 72 18 8 43

16% 43% 11% 5% 26%

Times 155 9 65 9 14 58

6% 42% 6% 9% 33%

People’s 91 2 68 5 7 9

Daily 2% 75% 6% 8% 10%

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These results show vast differences between the three newspapers in sourcingpatterns. First, differences between The New York Times and The Times are seen inall three types of sources. The Times used more official (25 percent) but fewerprotestor (58 percent) sources than The New York Times (respectively 13 percentand 78 percent). The Times has twice as many sources from outsiders as The NewYork Times. The People’s Daily overwhelmingly used protestor sources (97 percent),no official sources and very few outsider sources (3 percent). Therefore, H1 issupported.

This study also attempted to explore differences between the three newspapersin their overall frames for the news story and overall favorability toward the protes-tors. H2 predicted significant differences between the three newspapers in terms ofevent frames, and H3 predicted significant differences between the three news-papers in terms of overall favorability toward the protestors. The results are shownin Table 4.

Table 4 shows that there are notable differences between the three newspapersin both event frames and favorability toward the protestors. The Times used morelegitimate frames (70 percent) than The New York Times (56 percent), while TheNew York Times used more conflict frames. In terms of overall favorability, The Timesappears to be more favorable with a mean of 3.62 (middle point is 3) than TheNew York Times (2.86). In comparing the People’s Daily with The New York Timesand The Times, the differences were even more salient. The People’s Daily used

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TABLE 3

Sources by Paper

Official Protestors Outsiders

NYTimes 92 12 72 8

13% 78% 9%

Times 74 18 43 13

25% 58% 18%

People’s Daily 67 0 65 2

0% 97% 3%

TABLE 4

Event Frames and Overall Sympathy with the Protestors by Paper

Total Legitimate protest Conflict Deviance Favorability

NYTimes 36 20 8 8 2.86

100% 56% 22% 22%

Times 34 24 3 7 3.62

100% 70% 9% 21%

People’s Daily 45 43 2 0 3.95

100% 96% 4% 0%

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predominantly legitimate frames (96 percent), with only 4 percent conflict frames.The overall favorability of the People’s Daily exceeded the two other newspaperswith a mean of 3.95. Therefore, both H2 and H3 were supported.

Discussion

This study examined the characteristics of anti-war protest coverage in The New YorkTimes, The Times and the People’s Daily. Comparisons were made in several dimen-sions of the content including story salience, sourcing patterns, frames, themes andfavorability toward the protestors in order to gauge the similarities and differencesbetween media in comparable press systems (the US vs Britain), and contrastingpress systems (western vs Chinese). The results show several significant findings.

First of all, the overall coverage patterns exhibit as many differences as similar-ities in the three newspapers. In terms of attention, the People’s Daily gave muchmore space and prominence to protest stories than the two western newspapers.Considering the fact that the People’s Daily is normally three or four times shorterthan the other two, and its front pages are routinely allocated to Party propaganda,such attention and prominence to protests were phenomenal. In terms of locationof protest events, the Chinese newspaper published more multiple location protests,suggesting more extensiveness of the coverage. From a functional point of view, theprominence and extensiveness of the anti-war coverage certainly highlighted theanti-war frames that may in turn influence the general public’s perception of the warin Iraq, in addition to reflecting the policies and stance of the government. However,it is interesting to note that a greater percentage of the stories were episodic hardnews instead of issue stories laden with harsh criticism of the American–British warpolicy, as had usually been the case with the People’s Daily. The causes for this maybe complex, but two factors could be suggested here. First, it is a reflection ofChina’s relative ‘softer’ stand on the Iraq situation. Unlike countries such as Russia,France and Germany, who openly and strongly opposed the war, China kept a ratherlow profile. Second, it might also be a result of the subtle changes in Chinese jour-nalistic practice in general, notably from pure propaganda to a more informativeservice, which has already been identified in many studies on the Chinese mediasystem (Huang, 2003; Lee, 2000; Zhao, 1998). In the case of The New York Timesand The Times, the two newspapers roughly gave the same amount of attentionand prominence to protests, as suggested by the total number of stories, news storyplacement and average length of stories, which may be explained by their similarpolitical situation and journalistic practices. However, The Times seems to focusmore on the issues rather than the episodic side of the protest events. This is notsurprising as the British news media are known for being more likely to editorializean event. This might also be explained by the fact that the war is a more contro-versial issue in Britain because of the general anti-war climate in Europe.

In terms of sourcing patterns, The New York Times used more protestor sourceswhile The Times used more government sources and outsider sources. In contrast,the People’s Daily coverage was dominated by protestor sources and no govern-ment sources were included. Previous studies have suggested that sources have a

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big influence on how the stories are framed. Protestor sources are more likely tooffer more emphasis on the perspectives of the protestors, indirectly reflecting thepolitical orientation of the editorial stand of the newspaper. However, it should benoted that the differences in sourcing patterns between The New York Times andThe Times in this particular case might also be explained by the differences in thepercentage of story types between the two papers. As shown in the data on storytype discussed earlier, The Times published more issue stories than episodic stories,which indicates that the British newspaper might seek more institutional sourcesand outsiders rather than focusing on the sources available in the events themselves.

The study also examined the overall frame used to present the protest stories.The People’s Daily, not surprisingly, presented nearly all protests as legitimate socialactions, with only a few stories depicted as conflict between the protestors and thepolice. Again, this can be explained by the political and ideological biases of thenewspaper. In contrast, The New York Times presented more stories with conflictframes while The Times was more likely to present the protests as legitimate publicactions. The differences in proportion of legitimate event frames were correlatedwith the different favorability given to the protestors in the news coverage, withthe People’s Daily displaying the highest favorability, followed by The Times and TheNew York Times. Such findings generally support studies that the news media havea salient pro status quo bias, although in the case of Chinese paper, the status quobias is just the opposite of the two western papers. However, it should be cautionedthat alternative explanations may also be valid. For instance, it can be argued thatThe New York Times’s coverage appeared to be more ‘neutralized’ because of theAmerican journalistic tradition of objectivity and detachment.

One of the major goals of social movements is to get their voices heard by thepublic. What they say during the protests constitutes important political and ideo-logical messages to the spectators, and through the coverage of the news media,to the audience. Therefore, coverage of their utterances is an important part of theentire news-framing process. The Chinese newspaper included more policy attacksin citing the utterances of the protestors while mentioning no personal attacks.Accordingly, the protestors’ position and self-justification were also highlighted. Incontrast, in presenting the themes of the protestors as shown in the slogans,banners and stickers, The New York Times and The Times showed similar patterns ingeneral, but differences are also notable. For instance, in terms of attacks, The NewYork Times presented more themes of personal attacks than its British counterpart.It is also important to note that The Times mentioned more pro-Iraq statementsthan The New York Times, which offered more incidences of anti-Americanism.These results might suggest important cues for understanding the media frames ofthe coverage. By presenting more salience to themes such as personal attacks andanti-Americanism, the American news media may provide important cues for thepublic to perceive and evaluate the goals and nature of the protests. This is echoedby the slightly less favorable attitude toward the protestors found in the Americannewspaper.

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Conclusion

This study examined the characteristics of anti-war protest coverage in threenational newspapers based on the theoretical framework of framing and the protestparadigm developed in previous studies. Analyses were thus focused on the selec-tion bias (what gets covered as reflected in number of stories, prominence given andextensiveness of the coverage) and the description bias (how coverage was framedin terms of sourcing patterns, overall event frames, themes of utterances and favor-ability toward the protestors). Results showed an overall status quo bias of the news-papers. The coverage of the three newspapers echoed the policies and stands oftheir respective government. Data analyses also displayed interesting similarities anddifferences between the three newspapers, thus enabling an exploration of mediaperformance in comparable media systems (The New York Times vs The Times), andbetween contrasting media systems (The New York Times and The Times vs thePeople’s Daily). The results, on the one hand, reinforced the general normativepremise that news media performance is generally confined within the political andsocial systems (McQuail, 1992; Siebert et al., 1956); on the other hand, the mediacontents, on the practical level, were also dependent on the specific political climate,public mood, as well as journalistic practices at particular historical moments. Also,it is important to point out that these changes may also result from changes in inter-national political and economic landscapes in general. Therefore, media coveragestudies in an international context may provide important insights into both mediacoverage per se and theoretical considerations in general.

Transnational media studies is a complex issue complicated by both technicalproblems such as data access, language barriers and comparability, as well as theor-etical problems. As far as this particular study is concerned, several limitations arenoticeable. First, although the three newspapers chosen could be said to be repre-sentative of the news media in the respective country, a sample of multiple papersrather than just one would increase the significance level and generalizability of thefindings. Future studies might include more newspapers, and preferably, differentmedia such as television news. Another limitation to note is the conceptualizationand operationalization of some of the variables used in the study, particularly latentones such as frames and themes. Although particular caution was paid to intercoderreliability in this study, validity and reliability are still legitimate concerns. Mediascholars in related fields should focus on certain conceptual and operational issuesso as to obtain more clarity, consistency and validity of the concepts and measure-ments through repeated tests and adjustment.

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Zengjun Peng is an assistant professor of journalism at St Cloud State University,Minnesota, USA. His research interests include international mass communica-tion and news processing and effects.

Address Department of Mass Communications, St Cloud State University, 7204th Avenue S., St Cloud, MN 56301, USA. [email: zpeng@stcloudstate.edu]

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