Browsing by Author "Zhang, Dennis Zhibin"

China’s economy is highly relevant to European decision-makers and citizens, and has also become a high-profile news topic in Europe’s news media. This thesis focuses on the economic coverage and media performance of Euronews, the most watched news channel in Europe. This research aims to explore how the news on China’s economy is framed by Euronews, and discusses how Euronews implements its public service role, connecting to European citizens with a European perspective in its economic coverage of China. This study prudently revisited the previous academic studies on Euronews, particularly those published in the New Millennium. Two critical issues in relation to its media performance are crystallised – one is how Euronews can perform as an independent 'fourth estate' which provides news information for European citizens based on their holistic public interest, and the other is whether or not Euronews is able to achieve the goal of supranational news-reporting while excluding national viewpoints. This study employed news framing analysis on the basis of content analysis with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The research design was formulated in accordance with Van Gorp’s method of news framing coding. The use of issue, economic consequence, source and stereotype frames were respectively analysed. Chi-square and Cramer’s V tests were employed to prove the correlations between the economic consequence frame and the source and issue frames. The findings of this study demonstrated that Euronews somewhat prefers to use economic statistics and analyses to report China’s economy. Euronews pays more attention to the statistics which indicate a negative outlook on China’s economic growth. Euronews basically recognises the importance of China’s role in the global economy. However, the coverage does not give prominence to the intimate economic bond between the EU and China. The results can also confirm the previous research that Euronews is only able to provide a limited European perspective and partial voice of the public. The findings altogether indicate that Euronews has not achieved the ideal of reporting economic coverage in terms of social responsibility journalism. The analysis endorses that the deficiency in the European perspective results from Euronews’ special news sourcing procedure which was installed for accommodating the constriction of its limited production budget. However, eventually, the failure of supranational news-reporting is deemed to be a consequence of the absence of a consolidated European journalistic culture. After all, as for the case of economic coverage of China, Euronews is overall deficient in communicating the European perspective in a fair and impartial manner. Even though a supranational public service broadcaster appears glamorous for the European viewers, this study has to raise the concern that the concept can hardly be implemented into reality by the hands of the current Euronews.