Foreign reporters' aggressiveness and Chinese officials' openness at news conferences: influences on foreign media coverage of the Chinese government

Abstract

This study used content analysis to examine the relationships among Chinese officials' openness strategies at news conferences, foreign reporters' aggressiveness, and the valence of foreign media coverage of the Chinese government. Controlling for the time period and political sensitivity of the topics of news conferences, this study found that the foreign reporters' personal evaluations of Chinese officials were negatively associated with the media coverage valence and that Chinese officials' openness strategies were positively correlated with the media coverage valence and moderated the negative association between reporters' evaluations of officials and media coverage valence. Methodological implications are also discussed.

Keywords::

• public relations
• media relations
• news
• gatekeeping
• openness
• aggressiveness
• China
• foreign correspondents

Acknowledgements

The research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China, 11XNF006.

Notes

^1. See http://www.china.com.cn/zhibo/node_7030558.htm or http://www.scio.gov.cn/xwfbh/xwbfbh/.

^2. The five conferences that have only opening remarks were related to Tibet issues, foot-and-mouth disease, agricultural development, the Boao Forum (an economic organization), and taxation. Only Tibet is a very sensitive issue that was intentionally deleted by the Chinese government. The remaining four issues were very common topics and may have been unavailable due to technical reasons. It can be concluded that the missing values did not affect the results of the study.

^3. In the original study, Clayman and Heritage (2002a) used 11 items and trimmed them down to 10 in later publications. However, this study measured all items.

^4. Terms that were very close to .05 were retained.

^5. Follow-up questions were removed because of their lack of frequency. Three directness variables were combined into a single directness variable. Thus, the number of items in the analysis was reduced from 12 to 9.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Di Zhang

Di Zhang (PhD, Syracuse University) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China, Beijing. His research interests include organizational-public relationship cultivation strategies, crisis communication, and social media-based public relations.

Pamela J. Shoemaker

Pamela J. Shoemaker (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the John Ben Snow Professor in the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on international news and gatekeeping.