ICA-2-10365 A frog in a well: People’s Daily and its Geographic Landscape
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People’s Daily foreign news themes
Politics
9%
Ecnom ics
12%
Foreign affairs
23%
Military affairs
27%
Crim e
4%
Disaster
6%
Cultural/education/
Evironm ent
10%
Sci/Tech.
9%
----People’s daily News Themes (Chart. 5)
Discussion and Conclusion
From content analysis of People’s Daily International news page, it is obvious
that four groups dominated the world landscape in People’s Daily. They are: China’s
rivals—US, Japan; China’s partners/allies—Russia, South Korea; China’s followers—
Cuba, North Korea, and some African countries. The fourth group, Middle East and
South Asia, is troublesome. With the dominance of these four groups, the rest of the
world is reported only sporadically. People’s Daily portrays the world in such a way so
as to map out China’s foes, partners and followers to serve its own political agenda and
ignores lots of other nations. It’s very problematic when ¼ of the world’s population
gives ¾ of its news attention to only 10 countries. China accuses western media of their
monopoly in international news flow, Chinese media gives majority of their news to the
first world as well.
Without diversity and a wide-range spectrum of messages People’s Daily offers
international news with limited geographic scope and concentrated news themes.
Repeated themes are continuously presented and news reporting followed by certain
Convention