Dynamics of Culture Frames in International News Coverage: A Semantic Network Analysis

Abstract

A semantic network analysis was conducted to investigate how national political culture shapes news frames for international political coverage. Specifically, the Associated Press framed the Arab Spring as a process of pursuing democracy, a core value of American political culture, whereas Xinhua News Agency framed it as a crisis that challenged authority and the related stability, the central concerns of Chinese political culture. The results of the analysis of coevolution of cultural symbols indicate that competition between the two different cultural frames happened with the purpose of negotiating the meaning of the Arab Spring on the global stage.