Large-scale Quantitative Evidence of Media Impact on Public Opinion toward China
This research provides quantitative evidence of media influence on public opinion for political scientists and media researchers, confirming a long-hypothesized link.
This paper investigates the influence of mass media on public opinion towards other countries by analyzing 267,907 China-related articles from The New York Times since 1970. It found that the reporting from The New York Times in one year explains 54% of the variance in American public opinion on China in the subsequent year.
Do mass media influence people's opinion of other countries? Using BERT, a deep neural network-based natural language processing model, we analyze a large corpus of 267,907 China-related articles published by The New York Times since 1970. We then compare our output from The New York Times to a longitudinal data set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public's views on China. We find that the reporting of The New York Times on China in one year explains 54% of the variance in American public opinion on China in the next. Our result confirms hypothesized links between media and public opinion and helps shed light on how mass media can influence public opinion of foreign countries.