Based on Intermedia Agenda Setting (IAS), the current study examines how official media and semi-privatized commercial media on the Weibo platform covered the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Both supervised machine learning and time series analysis were employed to analyze 350,059 Weibo posts released by 3,883 news sources between December 2019 and April 2020. Our results indicated that, in this nonwestern state-regulated China media environment, official and semi-privatized commercial media had a significant reciprocal relationship in news coverage. Both of them focused on “treatment on patients,” “work resumption,” and “propaganda and mobilization.” Importantly, this paper sheds light on the value of the fine-grained level of agenda in IAS research. Using a fine-grained analysis, we separately investigated the effects of official and semi-privatized commercial media on predicting the pandemic prevalence, referring to the number of confirmed cases reported in real time. Implications and future directions were further discussed.

Grounded in the international image theory ( Herrmann and Fischerkeller, 1995 ), this study argues that individuals maintain general images of foreign nations that shape perceptions of foreign policy issues. Based on two identical national online surveys conducted in the United States ( N = 1250) and China ( N = 1311) in early 2019, the study explores the structure and composition of these national images among American and Chinese citizens and tests whether they influence perceptions of the U.S.–China trade war. The findings suggest that cognitive and affective components of national image are associated with the perceived favorability of the other nation and support for the U.S.–China trade war among the American and Chinese public. While media exposure played a more prominent role among U.S. respondents, personal traits such as cosmopolitanism, patriotism, cultural affinity, and personal contact with people from the other nation were significantly associated with people's overall favorability of the other nation and their support of the U.S.–China trade war.

Scholars have long questioned whether the traditional media effects approach can still be applied in the current digital media era, especially in the non-Western, state-regulated Chinese media environment. This study examines the intermedia agenda setting of traditional media sources and we-media sources in the WeChat Official Accounts through a computational look at the Changsheng Bio-technology vaccine (CBV) crisis. Utilizing LDA topic modeling and Granger causality analysis, results show that both traditional media and we-media (i.e., online news sources operated by individuals or collectives) focus more consistently on two frames, the news facts and the countermeasure and suggestion frames. Interestingly, the traditional media agenda impacts the we-media agenda under the news fact and the countermeasure and suggestion frames, while the we-media agenda influences the traditional media agenda under the moral judgment and causality background frames. Overall, our study demonstrates the mutual effects between the traditional media agenda and the we-media agenda. This study sheds light on the theoretical meaning of network agenda setting and extends its application to social media platforms in Eastern countries and health-related fields.

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Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, there has been a significant uptick in anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. Many believe these racist attitudes are cultivated by polarizing political messages and news coverage of the pandemic. Based on a 2021 online survey conducted among 914 White Americans, this study examines possible associations between exposure to pandemic-related news, anti-Asian stigmatization, and the perceived deservingness of Asian immigrants. The findings indicate that the consumption of pandemic-related news on Fox News and social media is associated with higher levels of anti-Asian stigmatization, while exposure to such news on traditional media outlets is not. As expected, respondents with higher levels of anti-Asian stigmatization perceive Asian immigrants as less deserving to come to the United States. Among the five criteria of a newly developed immigrant deservingness scale, especially identity, attitude, and need are associated with anti-Asian stigmatization.