A Study of The New York Times’ Reporting Tendencies on the COVID-19 in China in 2021

Abstract

Since 2021, as countries around the world continue to understand the novel coronavirus, tracing the source of the novel coronavirus, developing vaccines, and improving epidemic prevention policies have become the top priority, as well as an important means to curb the continuous spread of the novel coronavirus. However, with the continuous coverage of COVID-19, The New York Times and other English-language media tried to attach a political attribute to a global plague by shifting the topic and distorting the facts, which is also an important reason for this paper to study the bias of The New York Times in its coverage of China's COVID-19 in 2021. Based on The New York Times’ news coverage of COVID-19 in China in 2021, this paper highlights the bias of New York Times from four aspects: the origin of COVID-19, the effectiveness of China-made vaccines, China's epidemic prevention policies, and China's COVID-19 data. This paper adopts the text analysis method to summarize the reporting tendency of The New York Times by selecting the news reports that are in line with the time and subject scope, analyzing the core of their reporting content and internal context meaning. Finally, this paper concludes that when it comes to the COVID-19 epidemic in China, The New York Times tends to bring most of the news events into the political framework by misleading the interviewees, avoiding the important points, and ignoring the reasons for questioning, and distorting China's international image.