Discrepancies in the portrayal of the COVID-19 vaccine in Chinese and US international media outlets: A corpus-based discursive news values analysis

ABSTRACT

This article compares the discursive construction of news values in English news reporting of China Daily and CNN about the COVID-19 vaccine, to reveal how the two media packaged the vaccine and improved the acceptance of the international community towards the vaccines made in the respective countries. Adopting corpus linguistic methods and Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) framework, this study examines news values through keywords, nomination strategies, and photographs. The results show that the two media outlets constructed the news value of Eliteness dominantly through a systematic combination of words and images, albeit in different ways. China Daily prominently consists of references to China's international communications in the production and application of the COVID-19 vaccine, at the same time packaging the COVID-19 vaccine as foreign aid to enhance diplomatic relations as well as protect and promote the order of the international community. In contrast, CNN chiefly demonstrates references to domestic medical experts and the well-known manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccine, packaging the COVID-19 vaccine as the US’ medical/commercial product. The respective ways in which they portray the COVID-19 vaccine have helped to bolster the acceptance of each country's vaccine by the international community.

KEYWORDS:

• The COVID-19 vaccine
• news values
• Chinese and US international media
• corpus-based discourse analysis
• discursive news values analysis

Introduction

When the COVID-19 vaccine was first authorised and came into use globally, it suffered from public hesitancy to getting vaccinated, which has been defined as ‘delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccination services (Sage Working Group, 2014, p. 7)’. A relevant study (Hawlader et al., 2022) shows that during the primary vaccination stage, 20% of the population expressed unwillingness to receive the vaccine in developed countries, while in developing countries reluctance was as high as 63.2%. The obstacles that stood in the way were reported as people's worries about the side effects of vaccination and their neglect of the seriousness of COVID-19 infection (Hawlader et al., 2022).

During this initial stage, media played a significant role in reducing people's COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and promoting immunisation coverage. Based on previous studies (Farhana et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2022), the positive news reporting of the COVID-19 vaccine greatly improved people's acceptance. This study focused on examining how the Chinese and US international media portrayed the COVID-19 vaccine through news reporting, to improve the acceptance of the international community towards the vaccine made in their respective countries. News values are a set of criteria that shape the content of news reporting and how it is represented (Bednarek & Caple, 2017; Bell, 1991). Investigating the construction of news values gives insight into the depiction of a social event in the media and the values inherent therein (Bednarek et al., 2021). Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) involves the study of these hidden news values by analysing ways in which newsworthiness is constructed through multimodal news resources (textual and visual). Thus, in this article, we adopt the DNVA method to explore the different news values constructed by Chinese and US international outlets around the COVID-19 vaccine and the ways they are sold to international audiences.

Studies of COVID-19 vaccine coverage

News has been defined as both portraying the mental objects of social cognition and dominating the public attitudes towards news events (van Dijk, 1998). Against the background of the global COVID-19 pandemic, many scholars took interest in analysing the impact of news coverage on social attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine. The mainstream analysis approach these studies adopted is examining news structuring and news contents. For example, Kamboh et al. (2022) analysed the news sourcing routine and news structure of striking headlines in reporting by Pakistan media, to reveal the journalistic routines as factors promoting social hesitancy towards the COVID-19 vaccine in Pakistan. Pinna et al. (2022) investigated the role of cable television news in vaccine hesitancy and associated local vaccination rates in the United States and found that the media helped to increase vaccine hesitancy in local survey responses. Only a small group of scholars focused on revealing the public attitudes on COVID-19 vaccination through news content analysis, frequently employing the corpus-linguistic technique. For example, Koh et al. (2022) conducted a corpus-based news discourse analysis to explore the focus of the media reports on the COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic in the Republic of Korea and disclosed that the biggest anxiety of the public was the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine. Nor and Zulcafli (2020) employed a corpus-driven approach to analyse the themes of Star Online's (in Malaysia) reporting on the COVID-19 vaccine which reflected fear, anxiety and uncertainty in the majority of Malaysians.

The existing studies on COVID-19 vaccine coverage focused on specifying the direct relation between the news reporting and the society (social impact/social attitudes). However, from a sociolinguistic perspective, news structures and social structures are different and the two cannot be related directly (van Dijk, 2013). News values, which define the mental representations of language users as journalists or media, are an important connection to relate the two (van Dijk, 2013). Thus the existing related studies which lack the interpretation of media's (journalists’) intention in framing news reporting, are found lacking in depth. We have found that a meager amount of studies on COVID-19 vaccines focused on exploring their newsworthiness. For instance, Mogos et al. (2022) identified the news values employed in constructing news discourse on COVID-19 vaccination by Russian mainstream media. Though they interpreted their results from the perspective of news values, they solely focused on limited aspects of news. For example, Mogos et al. (2022) only examined the lexical constructions in news discourse on COVID-19 vaccination.

News values and a discursive approach to news values

Originating from journalism and communications research, ‘news values’ is a concept that has been largely conceptualised as the key driver in the news content (story/event) selection process (Palmer, 2000). Synthesising the previous journalistic and linguistic perspectives, Bednarek and Caple (2012, 2013, 2014) put forward a discursive view on news values, which made two-fold development. First, news values are defined as the ‘newsworthiness’ discursively constructed through discourse, thus becoming a quality of texts (Bednarek & Caple, 2013). Second, a wide range of semiotic devices, both linguistic and non-linguistic, are focused on to analyse the newsworthiness of the news discourse (Bednarek & Caple, 2014). The analysis approach derived from such a discursive view is named as ‘discursive news values analysis (DNVA)’ (Bednarek & Caple, 2014).

During the recent 10 years, Bednarek and Caple have continued progressively developing DNVA by expanding the scope of resource types that construct news values, from written language (Bednarek & Caple, 2012) to visual devices (Bednarek & Caple, 2013), and exploring various ways where DNVA is combined with analysis of attribution, which can show us both how sources are identified and how their talk is integrated (Bednarek, 2015).

With the expansion of the DNVA-focused semiotic resources, the categories and definitions of news values have also been constantly updated and improved, from 7 categories with a focus on linguistic devices only (Bednarek & Caple, 2012) to 11 categories which involve both textual and visual resources, including Aesthetic Appeal, Consonance, Eliteness, Impact, Negativity, Positivity, Personalisation, Proximity, Superlativeness, Timeliness, Unexpectedness (see Appendix). As this study focused on examining both the textual and visual resources in news reporting, and conducted a cross-cultural comparative DNVA study of Chinese and US media, we chose the 11 news values categories put forward by Bednarek and Caple (2017) and Bednarek et al. (2021) which include not only the news value of ‘Aesthetic Appeal’ for visual signs but also involve the cross-cultural sensitive definitions of newsworthiness (see Appendix).

Based on the previous ‘manually’ conducted DNVA (through close reading of relevant texts), scholars also demonstrated through a series of case analyses how corpus-linguistic techniques can be used in DNVA (Bednarek et al., 2021; Zhang & Caple, 2021). The corpus-based techniques these scholars applied in their studies include frequency list, collocation and concordancing examination, which help identify the frequent or repeated word forms, as well as the word forms that are strongly associated with each other in the dataset (Bednarek et al., 2021). Indeed, corpus techniques have been proved indispensable in enabling scholars to explore the most salient linguistic devices in each corpus which have the potential to construct marked news values, and to offer insights into ‘how happenings are sold to audiences as newsworthy’ (Bednarek & Caple, 2014, p. 143). It is the corpus-based text analysis method that we apply in this study, which allows us to explore the newsworthiness through a group of news texts and improves the accuracy of the results.

Bednarek (2015) also defined news values as the journalist's mental status in making news reports and the journalist's positioning of participants in the event, which is a ‘preferred reading’ (Bednarek & Caple, 2012) that can be created for the target readers. News values hereby have been described with the potential to gain insights into the reader positioning and news market constructs (Bednarek, 2015). Thus DNVA framework also helps deduce the targeted news market of the media through news values analysis.

As defined by Harkins (2023), cross-cultural communication refers to a hybrid branch of academia combining cultural anthropology, sociology and international studies that is focused on ways to facilitate understanding across borders and cultures. DNVA framework defines the news values from a cultural perspective and interprets the construction of news values with cultural contexts such as publication time and publication's target audience (Bednarek et al., 2021; Caple et al., 2020). A series of empirical DNVA studies fully justified that news values are socioculturally shaped and that they also constitute society and culture. For example, Caple et al. (2020, p. 84) discovered that the newsworthiness construction approaches in different countries’ national day reporting ‘not only depend on their political system or the extent of press freedom or censorship but also the strength of nationalism as a cultural value and the particular historical event that is marked by the national day’. Moernaut et al. (2019, p. 93) adopted the DNVA framework to uncover the disparate framing of news values in climate articles published by five media outlets in different areas of Belgium and found that ‘the journalistic values are often used in climate reporting to naturalise certain worldviews’. These existing cross-cultural discursive news values analyses have covered a wide range of news stories, including environmental issues, social life, political events, etc. Yet, till now, there are no cross-cultural DNVA studies focused on the COVID-19 vaccine. This study focuses on exploring the distinctive news process and the ideological forces that drive the Chinese and US international media in reporting on the COVID-19 vaccine, by comparing the construction of news values in the English-language outlets of Chinese and US international media. In this way, the present study makes the first DNVA attempt at ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ story analysis.

With the DNVA framework which is a highly effective tool for systematically revealing deeply-rooted ideological newsworthiness through multimodal news resources (including various textual and visual semiotic resources), this study thoroughly examines the discrepancies in the multimodal portrayal of the COVID-19 vaccine in Chinese and US international media coverage, the different mental constructions of the two countries’ media (news values), and the international attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine dominated by these news values. By this means the relation of Discourse-Cognition-Society is fully analysed, which improves the logicality of the argumentation process. Thus the DNVA analysis of the COVID-19 vaccine helps reflect more profoundly the cross-cultural perception towards the specific COVID-19 prevention method.

Empirically, we answer the following research questions in this study:

1. How was the COVID-19 vaccine defined and described in Chinese and US international media reporting?

2. What news values were constructed by these definitions and descriptions of COVID-19 vaccine?

3. How did these news values dominate Chinese and US newspapers in the portrayal of the COVID-19 vaccine?

Data and methods

Data

In this study, we focus on the newsworthiness constructed for international audiences. We chose the electronic English news reporting of the international mainstream media in China and the USA, which enjoy wider circulation compared with print newspapers. For Chinese news reporting, we chose China Daily which is China's national English newspaper, enjoys the widest international circulation, and has been analysed frequently by previous media communication studies as China's mainstream newspaper (Zhang & Caple, 2021). For US news reporting, we chose Cable News Network (usually abbreviated to CNN) which broadcasts English news in more than 210 countries and regions worldwide, and has extensive international readers (Erickson, 2023).

During the news collection, we found that both the Chinese and US international media had published limited quantities of reports on the COVID-19 vaccine before the first clinical trial, while after the clinical trial of the first vaccine, the news reports on the COVID-19 vaccine started to rise remarkably and steadily, which delineates the time when the vaccine was brought into sharp focus by the media and the public. Thus we collected the news reports published in the period from the clinical trial of the first vaccine until the data collection of this study started. The online news reports on the COVID-19 vaccine were retrieved from the Chinese media website (China Daily¹) and US media website (Cable News Network²) from 19th June 2020 (when China's first COVID-19 vaccine started to be delivered in the clinical trial) to 30th July 2022 (when the data collection of this study started) in the Chinese media reporting, and from 20th March 2020 (when the first COVID-19 vaccine started to be delivered in a clinical trial in the USA) to 30th July 2022 (when the data collection of this study started) in the US media reporting. Both periods of the two media in corpora collection are generally equal in terms of duration.

To ensure that the selected reports deal with the COVID-19 vaccine to a significant extent (not just mentioned), we manually surveyed these two online news websites and searched for the corpus that only includes those reports with ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ in the headline or ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ as the theme of the whole body of the reports. We have found that there are only 204 news reports regarding the COVID-19 vaccine in China Daily during the selected period, which has much less coverage than CNN which has 397 related news reports. For ensuring comparability, we decided to collect the round number 200 news reports for each media (including both the relevant verbal and visual texts). For China Daily, we collected the maximum 200 (round number) news reports; for CNN, based on quota sampling, we selected 200 news reports (about 50% of the total 397 quantities, containing a proportional number of the news reports in each month during the selected period), which can reflect the temporally complete features of the news reporting. At the same time, not all the news reports were illustrated with photographs and the quantity of news photographs illustrated in the reporting is less than 200 for CNN; thus we collected all the available news photographs and established two visual corpora.

Taking into account the varying lengths of the news reports, which renders the two corpora disproportionate in word counts (Table 1), we based the analysis on percentages rather than total numbers. As the present study is concerned with how news values are discursively constructed through both texts and images, a total of 200 photographs associated with the verbal stories have been collected in the corpus of China Daily, while 168 were included in the corpus of CNN (Table 1). Similar to the word counts, the number of photographs in the two media is unequal, which also necessitated using percentages as a benchmark for analysing the news values constructed by visual resources.

Table 1. The two corpora of China Daily and CNN.

Media	China Daily	CNN
The number of news reports Total word count	200 106,171	200 326,491
The number of photographs	200	168

Data analysis

To identify the news values as reflected in (1) keywords and their concordances, this study combines corpus linguistic techniques, thereby indicating the focus of the reporting (Zhang & Caple, 2021). Also, (2) the nominal labels for the COVID-19 vaccine are studied to reveal which aspects of the news entity are considered newsworthy (van Leeuwen, 2011). Moreover, we explore the visual devices used to portray the vaccines in the form of (3) photographs accompanying news reports (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006).

First, to demonstrate the saliency of the Chinese and US news corpora, we employed AntConc 3.5.8w³ (Anthony, 2022) for the keywords analysis, whereby each corpus served as a reference corpus for the other to help identify their differences. Taking into account the role of keywords as a pointer to the construction of news values (Bednarek & Caple, 2014), this analysis identified the news values established by the two corpora and their discrepancies. For a deeper study of how news values are constructed, we further indexed and analysed the whole sentences where the keywords occur in the corpus based on the concordance lines to reveal the portrayal of the COVID-19 vaccine events that the media believed to be worthy of the international readers’ attention.

Second, in the COVID-19 vaccine news corpora, ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ was frequently named as ‘vaccine’ for short, so we examined the concordance lines and collocations of the search term ‘vaccine’ (we manually checked the term ‘vaccine’ indicating ‘COVID-19 vaccine), and categorised the collocates (with three-word span) to the left of ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ or ‘vaccine’ based on their semantic meanings, to disclose how the term is presented (the nomination) in China Daily and CNN. This is because news writers define the news event by choosing the strategies which refer to the newsworthy entity (van Leeuwen, 2011).

Third, to analyse the construction of news values through imagery, we labelled the content and camera techniques demonstrated in the photographs; content, in this case, comprises the visual participants, their activities, the circumstances where these activities take place, etc. (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). The term camera techniques includes shutter speed (how fast), aperture (how much light), focal length (how much in focus), lens (how distorted/natural/condensed the shot) and angle (how high or low the angle) (Bednarek & Caple, 2012).

Fourth, through the DNVA framework we studied how all the multimodal semiotic resources based on keywords, concordances, and imagery combine together to determine the newsworthiness of the reporting.

Results

Keywords and their constructed news values

Table 2 shows the keywords with their frequencies and keyness values in the brackets (e.g. for the keyword ‘cooperation (345/974)’, ‘345’ indicates the frequency and ‘975’ refers to the keyness value). Most of the keywords for China Daily focus attention on international concepts, including a group of nouns (e.g. cooperation, countries, world, foreign, region, continent), proper nouns (e.g. South [Africa], BRICS, Sinovac, Thailand, Cambodia) and adjectives (e.g. international, African).

Table 2. The keywords (frequency/keyness value) in news reporting of China Daily and CNN.

Keywords	China Daily	CNN
Nouns	Cooperation (345/974) Countries (505/872) World (288/243) Governance (61/176.24) Foreign (75/155.79) Region (88/150.69) Continent (42/118.58) Future (89/147.85) Nations (85/143.58) Trade (80/176.75) Economy (87/143.17) Growth (63/140.47) Initiative (71/138.59) Projects (47/132.7)	Care (550/198.65) Kids (308/161.54)
(Possessive) pronouns		You (1570/745.27) They (1728/386.82) I (1430/373.63) She (806/296.93) We (2046/244.56) Your (358/161.47) Her (350/146.51)
Proper nouns/	Xi (70/197.66) Wang (53/149.65) South (Africa) (124/169.37) BRICS (241/681) Africa (259/629) Brazil (63/149.82) Sinovac (55/128.28) Thailand (36/101.64) Cambodia (84/237) Omicron (141/144.98)	Pfizer (1062/351.98) Moderna (554/185.04) FDA (630/164.96) Johnson (496/223.34) Dr. (476/154.96)
Verbs		Says (864/368.52) Say (413/121.99)
Adjectives	International (220/359) African (79/166.1) Industrial (57/144.59)	Pregnant (240/110.29)

The collocations show that these keywords demonstrate China's international contribution and help in providing COVID-19 vaccines and sharing vaccine production technologies and experience (see Example 1 to Example 6), highlighting the professionalism of China in COVID-19 vaccine research, development and production, which is superior to many other countries, and thereby establishing the news value of Eliteness. Besides, the frequent mentions of the countries, organisations and activities in the international community are geographically or culturally near the international audiences targeted by the Chinese international media (China Daily), simultaneously establishing the news value of Proximity.

Meanwhile, these ‘international’ keywords most frequently appear together with keywords indicating economic concepts, including ‘trade’, ‘economy’, ‘growth’, ‘Initiative’, ‘Projects’ and ‘industrial’, demonstrating China's focus on global economic recovery together with the production and application of the COVID-19 vaccine in the post-pandemic period. For instance, Example 7 shows China's call on the BRICS countries to simultaneously expand the use of COVID-19 vaccines and promote trade with each other during the pandemic age, which demonstrates the responsibility of China as a major country working to foster a new type of international relations and build a community with a shared future for mankind. This can also be argued as the construction of Eliteness by portraying China's leadership role in the international community.

Example 1

As a big country, China should give full play to its advantages in digital science and technology, strengthen scientific and technological cooperation in the region, help improve the digital anti-COVID capability of Asia-Pacific countries, and help solve the domestic risks of developing countries to promote the region to become a community of innovation, integration and green sustainable development.

(China Daily, July 19, 2022)

Example 2

Data from the Ministry of Commerce showed China has provided more than 2.2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to more than 120 countries, regions and international organisations.

(China Daily, August 1, 2021)

Example 3

The improvement of Chinese vaccine enterprises’ position in the global vaccine industry was achieved in the past 2 years through expanding production capacity, establishing cross-region logistics, improving commercialisation and strengthening international cooperation, he said.

(China Daily, August 1, 2022)

Example 4

Meanwhile, China has long upheld the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs and insisted that its collaboration with foreign countries has no political strings attached.

(China Daily, February 10, 2022)

Example 5

… China is willing to work with Africa to put President Xi's Global Security Initiative in place on the continent.

(China Daily, July 12, 2021)

Example 6

Most of the vaccines that Cambodia used in its national immunisation campaign were from China, which also provided equipment and sent medical experts including a traditional Chinese medicine team, to help the country fight the pandemic.

(China Daily, June 15, 2022)

Example 7

So, in summary, the BRICS countries can do quite a few things to boost their post-pandemic recovery, specifically, through greater use of effective vaccines, greater actual trade with each other and true improved development of their financial systems. But, these require serious efforts and not just words.

(China Daily, June 14, 2022)

In contrast, CNN has been found with keywords prominently focusing on the identities of medical professionals (e.g. they, I, she, we, her, Dr.) and their words (says, say) on the COVID-19 vaccine. For example, ‘she’, ‘they’, ‘her’ in the news reporting refer to ‘Julie McElrath (director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle) and her research team’, ‘Nathalie Landry (Medicago's executive vice president for scientific and medical affairs)’, ‘Dr. Deborah Fuller (professor of microbiology at the University of Washington)’, etc. ‘I’ and ‘we’ are used as self-referents in the quotations of the medical experts, such as ‘Gregg Glenn (Novavax's president of research and development) and her colleagues’, ‘Julie Mcelrath (medical expert)’, ‘Dr. Paul Goepfert (experts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) and his research team’. Their concordance lines show that these medical professionals have been reported with an abundance of quotations to express their viewpoints on the research, production and use of the COVID-19 vaccine (see Example 8 to Example 11), and we have found that the quotations from these medical professionals are just the contents which the two keywords ‘say/says’ indicate (see Example 12). Consequently, the news value of Eliteness has been construed by medical professionalism, with references to medical professional identities and medical terminologies (e.g. ‘mRNA vaccines’ and ‘symptomatic infection ‘ in Example 11).

Besides, another three keywords including ‘care’, ‘kids’ and ‘pregnant’ prominently construe the news value of Personalisation by depicting the situations and experience of the ordinary people (common citizens, especially kids and pregnant) with the COVID-19 vaccine. The concordance lines further show that these three keywords mainly occurred as the concerns of the medical professionals in their quotations on the effects of the vaccine in kids and pregnant women (see Example 13 and Example 14). Thus it can be argued that the construction of Personalisation is affiliated with the news value of Eliteness in the CNN’ reporting.

Example 8

‘It started just because I felt it was difficult to express my gratitude to the people I was working with, and the community effort that it took for so many people to get the vaccine’, she (nurse in Boulder, Colorado) explained.

(CNN, September 8, 2021)

Example 9

Some scientists say they aren’t needed for healthy people and the doses would more helpful for the unvaccinated in countries with limited supplies.

(CNN, September 16, 2021)

Example 10

Gregg Glenn, Novavax's president of research and development said in an interview in September 2020. ‘I am very optimistic by the year-end we’ll have a lot of product and we’re talking about more than 2 billion doses in 2021’.

(CNN, November 1, 2021)

Example 11

DOUCLEFF: So, for instance, a study from the CDC found that the ability of the mRNA vaccines to stop a symptomatic infection has dropped a bit over time, but we’re (the researchers) talking about a change from more than 90% effective to about 80% effective.

(CNN, September 16, 2021)

Example 12

But in general, he (Dean of School of Medicine, UCSF) says we should think about more than just whether or not you’ll end up in the hospital. There's also the chance of getting quite sick, spreading it to others and possibly having long-term health problems … 

(CNN, September 16, 2021)

Example 13

‘People were saying “Oh, kids don't get COVID” – that's really not true’, says Dr. Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician in suburban Atlanta. ‘They are getting it at the same rates as we would expect, based on their [portion of the] population’.

(CNN, September 9, 2021)

Example 14

‘For pregnant women and the immunocompromised – just at this point – it will be something that providers will need to consider on an individual basis for patients’, said Marks.

(CNN, November 17, 2020)

To sum up, in reporting the COVID-19 vaccine, both China Daily and CNN dominantly constructed the news value of Eliteness in keywords, but in different ways. China Daily mainly construed Eliteness through abundant illustrations of China's aid and contribution to other countries in the development and production of the COVID-19 vaccine (as well as the economic cooperation in the post-pandemic period). Accordingly, Eliteness is more prominently constructed by the depiction of China's diplomatic activities and political relations. Comparatively, Eliteness in CNN has been mainly constructed by portraying the professionalism of the domestic medical experts in research, development and usage of the COVID-19 vaccine. In other words, China Daily construed a more ‘diplomatic Eliteness’ in reporting the COVID-19 vaccine while CNN established a more ‘medical Eliteness’.

Nominations and their constructed news values

Table 3 demonstrates the nomination strategies and the occurrences/proportions of the nominations for the COVID-19 vaccine under the specific strategy in both China Daily and CNN. For example, the nomination strategy ‘Professional medical terminology (153, 100%/263, 74%)’ indicates that the nominations for the COVID-19 vaccine as Professional medical terminology occur 153 times in China Daily and represent 100% of all the nominations. Meanwhile, the nominations for the COVID-19 vaccine as Professional medical terminology occur 263 times in CNN representing 74% of all the nominations. The expression ‘COVID-19 vaccine (148)’ indicates that the nomination ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ occurs 148 times in China Daily.

Table 3. Nominations of the COVID-19 vaccine in news reporting from China Daily and CNN.

Nomination strategies	Expressions
	China Daily	CNN
Professional medical terminology (153, 100%/263, 74%)	COVID-19 vaccine (148) inhalable vaccine (2) booster shot vaccine (1) Omicron-based vaccine (1) aerosol vaccine (1)	COVID-19 vaccine (215) coronavirus vaccine (24) RNA vaccine (24)
Producer's company name (0, 0%/89, 25%)		Johnson & Johnson vaccine (68) Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (15) ET Pfizer's experimental COVID-19 vaccine (4) Moderna's vaccine (2)
Function (0, 0%/2, 1%)		Life-saving vaccine (2)

When it comes to the naming strategies in reference to the ‘COVID-19 vaccine’, both China Daily and CNN emphatically rely on professional medical terms, including ‘COVID-19 vaccine’, ‘inhalable vaccine’, ‘booster shot vaccine’, ‘coronavirus vaccine’, etc. The nominations of the COVID-19 vaccine in China Daily were entirely structured as medical terminologies (100%), establishing the news value of Eliteness (see Table 3).

In comparison, besides the 74% medical professional nominations, CNN also frequently branded the ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ with the company names of the producers (25%), such as ‘Johnson & Johnson vaccine’, ‘Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine’, ‘Moderna's vaccine’ and so on. As these companies mentioned in the nominations are all highly-reputable pharmaceutical giants in the USA, the news value of Eliteness has been consequently construed. Moreover, there are two occurrences of the nominations that indicate the ‘life-saving’ function of the vaccine.

Generally, in naming the ‘COVID-19 vaccine’, China Daily and CNN both dominantly constructed Eliteness through medical terminologies. Moreover, CNN also established a prominent Eliteness through the reputations of the US commercial vaccine producers.

Photographs and their constructed news values

Based on content and camera technique (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; van Leeuwen, 2005, 2011), we studied each photograph to analyse the visual construction of news values in the Chinese and US news corpora. Subsequently, the results were collated in an MS Excel spreadsheet to identify the number of news values constructed in each photograph. Figure 1 shows the collated results in percentages. The photographs contained in the two media outlets construct discrepant news values as will be elaborated below.

Figure 1. The construal of news values in the photographs in China Daily and CNN (as percentages).

Figure 1 shows that the photographs of China Daily and CNN construe a similar range of news values, with 46% for Eliteness and 54% for Personalisation in China Daily, and 43% for Eliteness and 57% for Personalisation in CNN. However, the contents that construe these news values in the two media are vastly different.

In the photographs of China Daily, the portraits of Chinese political leaders with the leaders of other countries and international organisations dominate the contents that construct Eliteness. For example, the photograph that portrays Chinese President Xi Jinping delivering a speech at the High-level Dialogue on Global Development in Beijing to guide global growth amid COVID-19 pandemic challenges (China Daily, June 27, 2022); the photograph that portrays Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Uzbekistan's Acting Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov linked arms and held talks (China Daily, July 28, 2022). In contrast, the Eliteness in CNN was mainly constructed through portraits of the commercial producers/companies of the COVID-19 vaccine (32%). For example, the photograph that portrays a pile of documents labelled with ‘Moderna’ (CNN, November 30, 2020), demonstrating Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine candidate gets more good news; the photograph that captured the building marked with ‘Pfizer’ (CNN, November 8, 2020), demonstrating FDA analysis of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine finds it effective and safe. A small quantity of the Eliteness-constructed portraits (11%) depict the domestic political leaders who are promoting the injection of the COVID-19 vaccine. For example, the photograph that portraits Biden delivering a speech to publicise his plans to get a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot (CNN, September 24, 2021); The photograph that portraits the governor of California Gavin Newsom delivering a speech to require all schoolchildren to get a COVID-19 vaccine once fully approved (CNN, October 1, 2021).

The news value of Personalisation in both of the two media is constructed by portraits of common people being vaccinated. CNN focused on the images of US domestic citizens, especially children, who were being vaccinated. For example, the photograph that portrays a black woman who was being vaccinated by a black female doctor (CNN, August 25, 2021); the photograph that portrays a young child who was tickled by a nurse during COVID-19 vaccination (CNN, July 15, 2021). In contrast, only a small part of the Personalisation-centred photographs in Chinese reporting focus on domestic vaccinated (e.g. a Chinese boy in primary school got COVID-19 vaccine, China Daily, July 23, 2022), and most of those photographs depict the vaccinated people in other countries which accepted China's COVID-19 vaccine. For example, a Pakistan boy got the COVID-19 vaccine (China Daily, June 27, 2022); an Indian girl was vaccinated by a doctor in the classroom (China Daily, July 17, 2022).

In camera techniques, the political leaders in the photographs of both China Daily and CNN are focalised with a close-up to highlight the central status of the political figures, with their expressions demonstrated. Besides, the signs of their authoritative status have frequently been set as the background (e.g. the blurred PowerPoint page marked with ‘VACCINE. GOV’ as the background of Biden who was delivering the speech, CNN, September 24, 2021).

In the photographs of China Daily, the background is usually filled with international signs (e.g. the Chinese, Cambodian and Argentinean national flags behind President Xi Jinping, China Daily, June 27, 2022; the Chinese national flag and the Uzbekistan national flag behind Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Uzbekistan's Acting Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov, China Daily, July 28, 2022). These camera techniques reinforce the political Eliteness constructed by the contents. It is the same case for the visual presentation of the commercial producers (companies) of the COVID-19 vaccine in CNN, which has been focalised with a close-up, highlighting the commercial mark from the blurry background (e.g. a pile of documents labelled with ‘Moderna’ was presented in a close up, with the doctor blurred as the background, CNN, November 30, 2020). The photographs that depict the common vaccinated people both in China Daily and CNN have all been taken from the eye level of the image participants and are mid-shots, so they enact a close and equal social relationship between the image participants and audiences, creating a sense of nearness for the audiences and constructing not only the news value of Personalisation but also Proximity (Bell, 1991).

Overall, the photographs in China Daily dominantly constructed Eliteness through the portrayal of diplomatic events of Chinese political leaders and established Personalisation through the depiction of vaccinated people around the world. While the photographs in CNN constructed Eliteness through the portrayal of US political leaders and medical/commercial producers in the domestic context and construed Personalisation through the depiction of US domestic vaccinated people.

Discussion

This discursive analysis of news values shows how a variety of words and images work in tandem to construct a combination of prominent Eliteness and Personalisation. China Daily prominently consists of depictions of China's foreign aid and contribution to the development and production of the COVID-19 vaccine. This is evidenced in the keywords and photographs that display the diplomatic communication, all of which serve to highlight the Eliteness in diplomacy coherently, while at the same time deriving Personalisation established by the visual depiction of vaccinated people around the world, the COVID-19 vaccine has been packaged by China Daily both textually and visually as diplomatic aid to protect and promote cooperation and order in the international community.

In contrast, CNN puts the spotlight on the US medical experts and the well-known producers of the COVID-19 vaccine in both keywords that represent the COVID-19 vaccines with nominations of the highly-reputable pharmaceutical giants in the USA, and in photographs that illustrate the US domestic medical contexts, etc., all of which combine to establish Eliteness as the dominant news value. This Eliteness is also accompanied by the construction of Personalisation in the images of US citizens who were being vaccinated. All of these resources in CNN frame the COVID-19 vaccine as the US’ commercial/medical products. These systematic interactions of the multimodal resources demonstrated by this DNVA study vividly display the ‘context model’ interpreted by van Dijk (2013), which dominates the construction of the whole news discourse and ascertains the coherence of narratives and their appropriateness for the ongoing communicative process.

The DNVA framework studies how the newsworthiness of specific events is constructed in published news reports, demonstrating the media's intention to attract an audience by presenting a story that is newsworthy to them (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). As shown in the present study, the wide discrepancies in the news value construction ways by China Daily and CNN help reveal their different ways of selling the COVID-19 vaccine as newsworthy to the target audiences (Bednarek et al., 2021), to reduce public reluctance to getting vaccinated, and improving the acceptance of the international community towards the vaccines made in the respective countries. China Daily lays stress on China's aid and contributions to other countries in the form of COVID-19 vaccines and demonstrates more international elements (such as the leaders and common people who are being vaccinated in other countries). This not only construed the news value of Eliteness, which greatly reinforced the international audiences’ trust in China-made vaccines, but also highlighted previous positive feedback from those countries that have adopted China's vaccines. More importantly, it also established Proximity which helps to form a closer geographical and emotional bond with international audiences. By this means, the COVID-19 vaccine made in China will be more easily sold and accepted by international audiences. By comparison, CNN made use of the well-known advancements of the capabilities of the domestic medical professionals, and the international popularity of the US medical giants to establish Eliteness and win the international acceptance of the US COVID-19 vaccines. However, despite their disparate ways of constructing newsworthiness, the two media foster the same intention of promoting the COVID-19 vaccine produced by their respective countries.

Cultural and social factors are determinants in the construction of news values and they feature prominently in the media communication process (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). China and the USA have different cultural values which influence the ideologies and behaviours of the people. Chinese culture has high levels of long-term orientation (LTO) based on the studies by Hofstede (2007) and Buck et al. (2010); while the USA is identified with short term orientation (STO) by Drucker (1986, september 30) and Laverty (1996).

The LTO dimension refers to future-related values for perseverance and discipline and can be identified through respect for social obligations to subordinate oneself for a forward purpose (Hofstede, 1991). Hofstede (2001) argued that high LTO is considered as originating from Confucian values and has a strong impact on Chinese family relationships, work relationships, governmental relationships and China's international relations: Chinese people are ‘accustomed to allowing time and resources to work toward building up strong positions/relations to pursue a more sustainable and greater interest; they do not expect immediate results (Hofstede, 2001, p. 361)’. Dominated by LTO, during the COVID-19 pandemic, China has not pursued short-term self-security which is more easy and fast to be realised by self-secluded COVID-19 containment strategy and self-sufficient vaccine production; instead, while China was still surviving for controlling the severe domestic epidemic and saving its civilians’ lives, it simultaneously sent thousands of medical teams and donated hundreds of millions of vaccine doses to assist many other countries (Jiang, 2022). These sacrifices of time and medical resources for other countries were made by China to pursue permanent security from the globally spread COVID-19 pandemic. Thus China's emphasis on international aid in combating the pandemic was a clear demonstration that the country was committed to ensuring a global community of health for all which in turn will bring long-term interest for China (Zheng, 2022). We can see that the way China pursued self-security dominated by LTO propelled the Chinese mainstream media China Daily highlights international communication/aid in news reporting on the COVID-19 vaccine. Furthermore, China also provided international medical aid to establish a positive national image in the world and build stable diplomatic relations with those countries which received China's help during the pandemic, to win future cooperation opportunities in more diversified areas including business, technology, politics, etc. (Chen & Liu, 2022). This future pursuit of China is fully demonstrated by the keywords of China Daily's news reporting about COVID-19 vaccines revealed by this study (see Table 2), which indicate economic concepts including ‘trade’, ‘economy’, ‘growth’, ‘Initiative’, ‘Projects’ and ‘industrial’, and demonstrate China's focus on global economic recovery together with the production and application of the COVID-19 vaccine in the post-pandemic period.

By contrast, the STO model can be identified through ‘quick result expectation’, ‘instant gratification’, and ‘small personal savings’ (Hofstede, 1991, p. 173), which predominantly guides the US in setting up plans and strategies for pursuing more prompt political and economic interests in international communication (Peterson et al., 2002). Thus the USA stepped up the establishment of high-tech and strict-security technological brands which enjoyed high preferences by the markets of many other countries and would bring big and quick profits (Hofstede, 1991). The same holds true for the US-made vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, which were packaged as medical/commercial products to win the international public's clear-cut preference, helping the USA rapidly realise its political goals and gain commercial profits (Saidin, 2022). These political contexts have further led US media to publicise the renowned pharmaceutical brands to increase other countries’ desire to purchase the vaccines, hailing the rapid development of bilateral relations and depicting the USA as a crucial partner. It follows that the news values and their construction ways are selected by the media based on the conditions of the social reality.

Compared with the majority of the previous COVID-19 vaccine coverage studies which lack interpretation of the media's intention in constructing news reporting and focus on limited aspects of news, this present study fully demonstrates the relation of Discourse-Cognition-Society in news construction through multimodal analysis (as discussed above). Moreover, this study is also the first attempt to conduct a cross-cultural comparative study that examines COVID-19 vaccine coverage, against the backdrop of previous studies which focused on exploring the role of the media in shaping the social attitude towards vaccines within a specific single country. In addition, the results of this study also improve the definition of the news values put forward by previous studies: most of the previous cross-cultural DNVA studies focused on the differences of news values construed by two outlets (e.g. Bednarek & Caple, 2013, 2014; Zhang & Caple, 2021), while this study has found that two news media may construct the same news value, but in widely different construction ways. For example, the dominant news value of Eliteness has been established as Eliteness in diplomacy in China Daily and established as Eliteness in medical professionalism in CNN. Of course, this study is limited that it has only selected one mainstream media outlet respectively in China and the USA, and our future studies should cover more media outlets (both mainstream and non-mainstream coverage) which may construct other interpretative packages and offer different insights into Chinese and US reader's cognition towards COVID-19 vaccine.

Conclusion

This study demonstrated that both the Chinese and US media constructed the news value of Eliteness, albeit in different ways. The US media focused on portraying the medical authoritativeness of the COVID-19 vaccine, highlighting the Eliteness in medical professionalism, while the Chinese media focused more on the diplomatic significance that China's COVID-19 vaccine will bring to the world rather than its medical aspects. These different reporting ways helped the two media to distinctively reduce the international public reluctance to get vaccinated and improve the acceptance of the international community towards the vaccines made in the respective countries.

This study has also demonstrated that both China Daily and CNN made use of a variety of keywords, nominations and images to package and promote the COVID-19 vaccine produced by their respective countries, exercising overall control in the production of news discourse, and ensuring its coherence in narratives and appropriateness for realising the self-marketing purpose for promoting the COVID-19 vaccine. China Daily prominently consists of references to China's international communications in the production and application of the COVID-19 vaccine, at the same time packaging the COVID-19 vaccine as foreign aid to enhance diplomatic relations as well as protect and promote the order of the international community. In contrast, CNN chiefly demonstrates references to the domestic medical experts and the well-known manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccine, packaging the COVID-19 vaccine as the US’ medical/commercial product.

This study presents a new cross-cultural investigation of DNVA in the COVID-19 vaccine event, which will provide stronger momentum for scholars who are interested in adopting DNVA to their local public health crisis. This study also provides Chinese and Western scholars with a comparative DNVA framework for linguistic and cultural analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The website of China Daily:: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/.

2 The website of Cable News Network:: https://us.cnn.com/.

3 The website of AntConc 3.5.8w: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html.

Appendix

Definitions of news values and their strategies are constructed by linguistic and visual resources adopted in this study.

Table

News value	The event is constructed as …	Verbal discursive strategies	Visual discursive strategies
Aesthetic appeal	Beautiful (visuals only)		The depiction of people, places, objects, landscapes culturally recognised for their beauty Capture (composition): balance (dynamic, asymmetric composition, making use of the diagonal axis; balanced, symmetrical images where the symmetry is momentarily interrupted) Capture (technical affordances): movement (blurring and freezing of action); noise (high level of graininess); focus (lengthening or reducing depth of field within the image)
Consonance	(Stereo)typical	References to stereotypical attributes or preconceptions; assessments of expectedness/ typicality; similarity with past; explicit references to general knowledge/traditions	The depiction of people and their attributes that fit with the stereotypical imagery of a person/country etc.; staged/highly choreographed depictions of typical activities associated with a person/group/nation
Eliteness	Of high status or fame (including news actors, organisations)	Various status markers, including role labels; status-indicating adjectives; recognised names; descriptions of achievement/fame; use by news actors/sources of specialised/technical terminology, high-status accent or sociolect (esp. in broadcast news)	Showing known and easily recognisable key figures; showing people in elaborate costumes, uniform, or with other regalia of officialdom; showing self-reflexive elements like microphones/cameras; showing people flanked by military, police, or bodyguards or in a media scrum; showing people using the specialist equipment associated with elite professions; showing context associated with an elite profession
Impact	Having significant effects or consequences (not limited to impact on the target audience)	Assessments of significance; representation of actual or non-actual significant/relevant consequences, including abstract, material or mental effects	Showing the after-effects (often negative) of events; showing emotions caused by an event
Negativity	Negative	References to negative emotion and attitude; negative evaluative language; negative lexis; descriptions of negative behaviour	Showing negative events and their effects; showing people experiencing negative emotions; showing people being arrested or (as defendant) with lawyers/barristers/police; showing people attempting to hide their identity or showing aggression towards the camera; showing people engaging in norm-breaking behaviour (e.g. fighting) Capture (technical affordances): movement/blurring involving negative content, resulting in poor quality images; noise (dramatising and intensifying negative content); focus (where extreme circumstances mean inability to provide sharp and detailed image content); in moving images (suggesting unstable situation, i.e. danger)
Positivity	Positive	References to positive emotion and attitude; positive evaluative language; positive lexis; descriptions of positive behaviour	Showing positive events and their effects; showing people experiencing positive emotions; showing people engaging in positively valued behaviour; showing actions associated with reconciliation or praise Capture (technical affordances): movement/blurring involving positive content, resulting in excellent quality images
Personalisation	Having a personal or ‘human’ face (involving non-elite actors)	References to ‘ordinary’ people, their emotions, experiences; use by news actors/sources of ‘everyday’ spoken language, accent, sociolect (esp. in broadcast news)	Showing ‘ordinary’ individuals, especially when singled out and standing in for a larger group; people dressed in informal/everyday clothing; carrying items such as rucksacks, handbags, shopping bags; showing an emotional response; in the home/domestic setting; on the street Capture (composition): salience (positioning individuals in unequal relation to others in the image frame, e.g. through foregrounding or backgrounding); shot length (using a close-up shot to focus on a person's emotion, for instance) Capture (technical affordances): focus (reducing the depth of field so that the focus remains on the individual)
Proximity	Geographically or culturally near (the target audience)	Explicit references to place or nationality near the target community; references to the nation/community via deictics, generic place references, adjectives; inclusive first person plural pronouns (e.g. our nation's leaders); use by news actors/ sources of (geographical) accent/dialect (esp. in broadcast news); cultural references	Showing well-known or iconic landmarks, natural features or cultural symbols (e.g. flags, national colours/distinctive uniforms); showing verbal text indicating relevant place/cultural connection
Superlativeness	Of high intensity or large scope	Intensifiers; quantifiers; intensified lexis; metaphor and simile; comparison; repetition; lexis of growth; only/just/alone/already + time/distance or related lexis (only hours after)	Showing the large-scale repetition of participants in the image frame, e.g. not just one house but an entire street affected; showing extreme (positive or negative) emotions in participants Capture (composition): shot length (use of very wide angle to exaggerate differences in size/space; magnification) Capture (technical affordances): movement (camera movement and blurring, combined with camera-people moving around, running, ducking to avoid projectiles, etc.)
Timeliness	Timely in relation to the publication date: new, recent, ongoing, about to happen, current or seasonal	Temporal references; present and present perfect; implicit time references through lexis (continues, ongoing, have begun to); reference to current trends, seasonality, change/ newness	Natural phenomena that indicate time (e.g. the season may be implied in flora or environmental conditions); inclusion of cultural artefacts, like Christmas trees that are representative of a particular time of year; showing the revealing of an item, to be seen for the first time; including verbal text indicating the relevant time
Unexpectedness	Unexpected	Evaluations of unexpectedness (different, astonishing, strange), references to surprise/expectations (shock at North Cottesloe quiz night, people just really can't believe it); comparisons that indicate unusuality (the first time since 1958); references to unusual happenings (British man survives 15-storey plummet)	Showing people being shocked/surprised; showing unusual happenings that would be considered outside an established societal norm or expectation Capture (composition: salience): juxtaposition of elements in the frames that create stark contrast

Summary of the definitions and strategies of linguistic-visual discursive news values identified by Bednarek and Caple (2017, pp. 260–271); Bednarek et al. (2021, p. 707).