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ABSTRACT
This study examines news coverage of an assault upon an interracial couple that happened in Taiwan in 2015. Using narrative analysis from a social identity perspective, the study notes that Taiwanese news media suppressed gender salience in their coverage of this incident to construct a favorable Taiwanese identity; nevertheless, this strategy was performed at the price of reducing the urgency to combat sexism at a societal level. International news media framed the same event as a case of both racism and sexism; however, racism was given different symbolic meanings by different media, with each international news press conceptualizing racism in a way that met its local audience’s identity needs. In addition, both Taiwanese and international news organizations employed several social identity strategies in their news coverage to negotiate desirable international relations. These findings reveal that news media function as agents of international communication in today’s age of globalization.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Dr. A. Atwell Seate, Dr. L. Steiner, and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and kind assistance during the preparation of this article.
Notes
1 News coverage of the chosen case decreased significantly after 1 December 2015, and the few news articles about this case published after December 2015 were mostly duplicates of previous reports.
2 Because the sample was restricted to online publications, the study focused its analysis on the text of news articles only.
3 Two articles published by Taiwanese news organizations also discussed Taiwanese society’s racism against people from China and Southeast Asian countries and how such hostility was associated with Taiwanese society’s anxiety toward competition from these countries in their reports of Taipei subway incident (Bauer, Citation2015; Chen, Citation2015). Interestingly, these two articles were published by English-language news media in Taiwan. Because English is not Taiwan’s official language, it is likely that the target audiences of these two articles were not limited to local Taiwanese. Instead, they could be targeted to wider audiences, including expatriates or immigrants in Taiwan. Correa (Citation2010) compared how two English- and Spanish-language news media published in a county largely resided by the Hispanic community portrayed Latinas. The two news media chosen for comparison were owned by the same company. Correa found that the English-language news portrayed Latinas as “others” or outgroup members. Correa posited that this framing decision could be caused by the fact that English-language news targeted more general audiences (i.e., audiences that were not limited to the Hispanic community). Correa’s study provides empirical evidence that media companies located in the same region may make different news-making decisions depending on their target audiences. If this is the case, one reason why Chen’s and Bauer’s articles enacted narrative strategies similar to those used by foreign news media could be that their target audiences partially overlap. Nevertheless, this interpretation should be validated with more future empirical analyses comparing media published in the same region but in different languages.