Abstract
Do mass media influence people’s opinions of other countries? Using BERT, a deep neural network-based natural language processing model, this study analyzes a large corpus of 267,907 China-related articles published by The New York Times since 1970. The output from The New York Times is then compared to a longitudinal data set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public’s views on China, revealing 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. This result confirms hypothesized links between media and public opinion and helps shed light on how mass media can influence the public opinion of foreign countries.
Public opinion of Americans toward China

This time series is aggregated from 101 cross-sectional surveys from 1974 to 2019 that asked relevant questions about attitudes toward China with the year of 1974 as baseline. Years with attitudes above zero show a more favorable attitude than that in 1974, with a peak of 73% in 1987. Years with attitudes below zero show a less favorable attitude than that in 1974, with the lowest level of −24% in 1976. The time series is shown with a 95% confidence interval.
Topic-specific yearly volume of The New York Times articles with sentiment on China from 1970 to 2019

In each year we report in each topic the number of positive and negative articles while ignoring neutral/irrelevant articles. The media have consistently high attention on reporting China government & administration, democracy, globalization, and culture. There are emerging interests on China’s economics, marketization, and welfare and well-being since 1990s. Note that the sum of the stacks does not equal to the total volume of articles about China, because each article may express sentiment in none or multiple topics.