What Shapes the Frame? The Role of Country, Topic, and Actor in the Framing of U.S. and China’s International Reports in Malaysian Press

This study explores how international news coverage frames United States and China in Malaysian newspapers, focusing on five dominant news frames: conflict, cooperation, economic impact, human interest, and morality.Drawing on a content analysis of 330 news articles from diverse global outlets, the study employs both descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression to identify patterns and predictors of frame usage.The results reveal that framing varies significantly by country, topic, and actor presence rather than by media outlet affiliation.China is predominantly framed through economic impact, reflecting its image as an emerging economic power, whereas the U.S. is more frequently associated with conflict and human interest narratives, aligning with perceptions of its global political and military dominance.Cooperation and morality frames, however, are more evenly distributed across both nations.Binary logistic regression identifies news topic and actor presence as the strongest predictors of frame usage: political topics trigger conflict and morality frames, economic topics predict economic framing, and citizen-centered stories evoke human interest and cooperation frames.Media outlet affiliation shows minimal influence, suggesting professional convergence in international journalism.These findings highlight the contentspecific and actor-sensitive nature of framing, underscoring the importance of contextual factors in cross-national media analysis.