The Construction of a Media Reality in Reporting the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay: The Case of the Beijing Evening News

Based on the frame theory, through content analysis and accompanying textual analysis, this study examines the reports by Beijing wanbao, the Beijing Evening Newspaper (BEN), on the Olympics and attempts to define what reality the media aimed to construct and the strategies it used. The Beijing Evening Newspaper was first published in 1958; it is one of the most influential in the Beijing metropolitan area and one of the evening papers with the largest circulation in the capital city of China and even nationwide. The sample comprises reports about the Olympic Games published by BEN between 24 March 2008 and 22 April 2008. The research was carried out firstly through simple random sampling, picking up 15 days of Olympic-related reports, with each report then assigned to one of the categories in the 'research structure'. Statistical inference was performed using SPSS13.0 to analyse multiple variables, discovering the codes that show how the media built a sort of reality by the construction process of agenda-setting, factual metaphor and using special mouthpieces.