Online partisan news and China’s country image: an experiment based on partisan motivated reasoning

Abstract

This research used a 2 × 2 pretest-posttest experimental design to measure China’s image after participants’ exposure to news stimuli on a partisan news website. Two manipulated factors were media congruency (congruent or incongruent) and news coverage (positive or negative). No effect of news coverage was detected, but congruent media led to significantly higher scores in country beliefs than incongruent media. In addition, a significant boomerang effect was found between news coverage and media congruency: the same positive coverage, when embedded in the congruent partisan media, resulted in the biggest enhancement of country beliefs and desired interaction, but led to the largest setback for these two dimensions when embedded in the incongruent partisan media. The findings suggest that when processing news about China, partisans are partially motivated by directional goals in the cognitive and conative components of China’s country image, but stick to accuracy goals in the affective dimension.