A Corpus-Based Contrastive Research on the Reports on Beijing Winter Olympics in Chinese and American Media

Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic, the biggest “black swan” event of recent years, has a profound impact on international relations and accelerates the evolution of the international relations pattern. The strategic interaction between China and the United States has taken on new characteristics, with a proliferation of Cold War thinking and conservative ideology in the United States and a rise in hostility towards China, as evidenced by the China-related reports in the New York Times, a mainstream media in the United States. The Olympic Games, as a worldwide sporting event, is covered in detail by the media of various countries. Due to the influence of political stance, ideology and cultural differences, the expression of emotions and value evaluation of the coverage of the Olympic Games vary among the media of different countries. Based on a self-built corpus, this paper compares and analyses the coverage of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics by the New York Times and the People’s Daily, the mainstream media in China and the US, from four parts of the corpus, including subject words, index lines, collocative words and collocative phrases, in conjunction with critical discourse analysis theory. The aim is to compare the different reporting strategies of the mainstream media in China and the United States when the Winter Olympic Games were held in Beijing, analyze the reasons for the differences in the coverage of the Olympic Games, and understand the perspective of American media workers, their communication skills that different from China, thereby achieving mutual communication between the Chinese and American media, eliminating misunderstandings and jointly creating a favorable international dissemination environment. This will ultimately contribute to building a new type of international relations with win-win cooperation and establishing an international image conducive to China’s development.