University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 China in the Media: Effects on American Opinion Laura Ruth Silver University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Communication Commons, and the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Silver, Laura Ruth, "China in the Media: Effects on American Opinion" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2017. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2017 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2017 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. China in the Media: Effects on American Opinion Abstract I explore how the tone of media coverage affects opinions of foreign countries by studying a particular case: the People’s Republic of China. I exploit the fact that recent presidential campaigns have focused a great deal of attention on China. Indeed, before the 2012 presidential election, media coverage of China was particularly high and largely negative due to campaign rhetoric about how China was stealing American jobs and ruining the U.S. economy. Using a nationally representative, pre- and post- election panel, I explore how these changes in media valence affect opinions of China. I use an original content analysis of mentions of China on U.S. political television to examine whether changes in the way the country is depicted in the media lead individuals to change their opinions of it. Results indicate that media valence does affect opinion; the increase in negatively-valenced coverage of China in advance of the U.S. presidential election increased the degree to which individuals perceived China to be a threat.