Strategy framing in the international arena: A cross-national comparative content analysis on the China-US trade conflict coverage

Abstract

Strategy framing is usually studied in the context of news coverage about domestic Western politics. This study expands its application to news reports on the China-US trade war—an inter-state conflict including a democratic and one-party dominant system—thereby adding an international dimension to the study of strategy framing. Through a manual content analysis of news coverage from China, the US, Singapore, and Ireland (from January 2013 to January 2020; n = 1872), we investigate whether media independence, conflict involvement, and crisis phases influence the employment of the issue framing and strategy framing. For democratic countries, the more involved they are in the conflict, the more prominent strategy framing was in their coverage of the trade conflict; the inverse was observed for one-party dominant systems. Strategy framing that considers countries as contenders is more prevalent than the sub-frame that focuses on individual politicians. The presence of national-versus-personal level strategy framing was more balanced for directly involved countries than indirectly involved countries since news from directly involved countries accords relatively more space to politicians’ personal strategy.