Dr. Hye Ryeon Jang will be visiting the department on Monday, October 23, 2023 at noon ten Hoor 257

 

Wag the Dog? The Impact of Media on U.S. Foreign Policy towards China

As the U.S.-China competition intensifies, the Biden administration has been imposing aggressive foreign policy toward China and news on China has flooded media platforms. In current literature, there lacks a consensus the media’s impact on foreign policy. This paper aims to examine how the media contributes to the aggressive foreign policy towards China. We argue that the media’s projection of China’s hostility contributes to the US aggressive foreign policy. Recently, China has become considered as the potential enemy. However, it is contestable whether China is a real threat. Thus, the media has potential to perform as an independent actor to influence foreign policy under non-urgent situations, China’s hostile images prevalent in media tend to make the U.S. government less hesitant to implement aggressive foreign policy towards China. We conducted computational text analysis to measure how the media projects China’s image. Additionally, based on a daily dataset, we used a linear autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) regression model to measure how negative emotions surrounding China projected by news media outlets impact Biden’s rhetoric towards China, and found results that align with our theory. The results of this paper provide a foundation for future scholarly research on the reevaluation of the media’s impact on foreign policy.