Influence of US political interests and dominant ideologies in New York Times' coverage of Covid-19 lockdowns in China and United States

• Main Author: Tang, Fan Xi
• Other Authors: Wu Wei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Social sciences::Political science
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/150744
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

US media coverage is shown to be influenced by political interests and dominant ideologies. This study aims to examine if this was the case in The New York Times’ coverage of lockdowns in Wuhan, China, and California, US. By identifying the frames and tone towards each government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to the news perspective, this study found that the outlet’s tone towards the Chinese government’s response was more negative than it was for the United States. The newspaper also focused on the citizen perspective when covering the implications of the lockdown in Wuhan but shifted to taking the government’s perspective when covering the US. This exemplifies how the news would usually perpetuate dominant ideologies of freedom and individualism by reporting the consequences of lockdown in Wuhan. However, when quarantine measures were instituted in the US, coverage would shift to favour elite ideology by emphasizing the need to abide by them. The findings of this paper thus add to existing literature that media content is far from an objective source of information but in fact propagates political interests and dominant ideologies.