How News Media Framing Affects Americans' Perceptions of Chinese Americans: A Survey Experiment

Recent spikes in hate crimes against Chinese Americans along with increased news coverage of China due to the coronavirus pandemic suggests a significant relationship between media portrayals of China and Americans’ opinions of Chinese Americans. This thesis explores this relationship to provide information on the impact of media portrayals of China on Americans’ opinions of Chinese Americans. Can different visual stimuli and rhetorical framings of news articles about China prime Americans to see Chinese Americans as a “yellow peril” or “model minority”? This research answers the preceding question empirically through an original online survey experiment in Qualtrics that recruited about 500 respondents from Amazon Mechanical Turk.