Resonance and Elaboration: the Framing Effect of Chinese Product Safety Issue Coverage

This study identifies five frames packages consistently employed by mainstream U.S. newspapers to report China-related issues, and tests the effects of framing via an experiment. For the first part, master themes are extracted via a meta-analysis of published research papers, while framing devices are isolated via a textual analysis of New York Times articles about China. Then symbolic devices and themes are then reassembled into frame packages. This approach of frame identification reduces guesswork by starting from the extraction of latent themes rather than manifest framing devices. Symbolic devices from the incompetent Communist package are then embedded by a veteran journalist into an article to test the framing effect model integrating framing theory and predictions from the elaboration likelihood model. It is found that reading framed texts changes attitude indirectly by affecting frame-related activation; attention to different media contents incurs either facilitative or distractive effects; and cultivated China schema and ethnocentrism exert an impact on attitude, too