Constructing the otheranalysis of foreign correspondents’ discourses and practices during the coronavirus crisis in China

Resumen

This dissertation examines foreign correspondents’ discourses and professional practices during their coverage of the coronavirus crisis in China from the perspective of intercultural communication. By putting research on foreign correspondence and intercultural communication in dialogue, this dissertation represents an attempt to fill a gap in the existing academic literature. It is divided into four parts: theoretical framework, approaching the case studies (which includes objectives, methodology and samples), discourse analysis and interviews. The theoretical framework draws from previous works on foreign corresponce and intercultural communication by Tulloch, Zeng, Hannerz, Hall or Rodrigo Alsina, among others. It proposes to study foreign correspondents within intercultural communication at two levels: as producers of discourses of intercultural content and as participants in intercultural-communication exchanges. That theoretical proposal is put into practice in this dissertation through a double study case. On the one hand, it analyzes and compares reporting on the coronavirus crisis in China by foreign correspondents from El País, ABC, Press Trust of India, Times of India, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Straits Times and South China Morning Post through a critical discourse analysis that combines a quantitative review of social actors, sources and story line and a qualitative examination of topics, representation of social actors and strategies of identification and alterization. On the other hand, the correspondents themselves explain their experiences during their coverage the crisis, as well as their understanding of foreign correspondence and their approach toward intercultural communication, through a series of semi-structured interviews. The discourse analysis finds that all correspondents included in the sample represented China and Chinese people as "other" at some point during their coverage of the coronavirus crisis in China. It also shows significant differences between the way the crisis was covered by the Indian correspondents and the rest of the sample. The interviews reveal that correspondents identified lack of information and access to sources as the main constraints on their coverage, and suggest that there is a plurality of perceptions about what being a foreign correspondent entails as well as diverging attitudes toward the intercultural dimension of their work. This dissertation observes continuities in the findings of previous research with regards to journalistic practices in the coverage of health crises and to international media discourses on China, and notes a certain degree of homogenization in the discourses and practices of correspondents from different cultural backgrounds.