An analysis of the correlation between media influence and the impression of the American public towards the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics

Abstract

This paper uses the Beijing Winter Olympics as a medium to study the relationship between the Western public's perception of China and the influence of mainstream U.S. media. The background is the long-standing prejudice of Western people's perception of China. This research contains two aspects: the analysis of media reporting tendency and a survey of public perception. After sufficient data collection and investigation, the correlation between them is analyzed. First, research on media coverage. The author selected 8 mainstream media in the United States as research objects. Web search crawler technology was used to collect reports from the media websites using related keywords. After analyzing these reports, the author found that the media reports are dominated by human rights (54.35%), and the majority (54.71%) are negative on the Beijing Winter Olympics. Second, a survey on public perception. Using the database and survey tools of Survey Monkey, a well-known American polling organization, elite respondents with high education and middle-to-high income were selected to conduct a survey on perception of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The survey results show that the public pay a majority of attention to human rights issues rather than the event itself, in line with the topical tendencies of media coverage. With the respondents' Overall Impression of the Beijing Winter Olympics as the dependent variable, and the Distrust (negative attitude) and Interest as the independent variables, the author adopted further statistical analysis methods including regression analysis to further examine the correlation between them. The regression analysis found that Distrust (negative attitude) has a larger influence on the Overall Impression than Interest. This finding is in line with expectations and also validates the research hypothesis that there is a close correlation between public perception of the Beijing Winter Olympics and media reporting tendencies. This study intends to explore the correlation, rather than causation, between media reporting tendency and the public’s perception of Beijing Winter Olympics. That is, the correlation exists, but a further study is necessary to confirm whether the public's perception is influenced by media reports, or the other way around holds true. The main part of this research was conducted before the Beijing Winter Olympics. To further verify the results, after the event the same method was used to conduct a second search on media reports and a second survey on public perceptions. The second search and survey found that the U.S. media reports on the sporting events have increased during the event, yet human rights and other negative reports still dominate the coverage. Accordingly, the public perception has also changed. While impression on the event has become slightly neutral, it is still mainly negative, and the concern about human rights still accounts for the largest proportion. This study also tries to make suggestions on how China can improve its international image: increase the content to be disseminated in Western mainstream media; pay attention to responding to negative reports by Western media and provide different sources of information; pay attention to seeking help through international economic cooperation.