SARS News Coverage and Its Determinants in China and the US

Abstract

/ This study investigates the prevalence of news frames in SARS news coverage from the Xinhua News Agency and the Associated Press (AP), as well as whether the frames were predicted by news environment and the SARS timeline. Factor analysis supported four frame dimensions: attribution of responsibility, human interest, economic consequences and severity. Frame prevalence was considered in terms of, first, the story as the unit of analysis and, second, word count as the unit of analysis. For both types of measurement, attribution of responsibility and severity frames were more common in AP. For economic consequences, story frame prevalence was higher in AP, while word frame prevalence was higher in Xinhua. For both types of measurement, economic consequences decreased over time, while attribution of responsibility and severity increased. Attribution of responsibility and human interest frames increased more over time in AP, while the severity frame increased more over time in Xinhua.