Abstract
This empirical study is in the field of mediated public diplomacy. It examines the role of state-sponsored media in international agenda-building during the 2014 Hong Kong Protest. In this study, state-sponsored media are conceptualized as tools used in international political public relations to influence international media coverage. A quantitative content analysis was performed to determine the association of state-sponsored media and agenda-building with news coverage in Taiwan and Singapore. The results showed that state-sponsored media were strongly associated with international news coverage with regard to object salience, attribute salience, and association salience, which indicated potential influence. In addition, the association of Chinese state-sponsored media with news coverage in Singapore was stronger than the association with news coverage in Taiwan, indicating that the influence of agenda-building was moderated by differences between countries and regions. In addition, we presented a message platform matrix and discussed its theoretical and practical significance. This study contributes to the scholarship on governmental strategic communication in the Greater China region by advancing the knowledge about the effectiveness of the Chinese government’s external strategic communication efforts in Chinese-speaking regions.
Acknowlegdement
The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Craig Carroll from New York University for his contributions to the preparation of the manuscript. In addition, we wish to thank two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve and clarify this manuscript.
Notes
1. The current article shares part of its dataset and coding protocol with another study (Citationin press) that used a different sampling procedure and different method of analysis.
2. The matrix was based on the result of Kiousis and Ragas (Citation2015).