  Do mass media influence people's opinion of other countries? Using BERT, a
deep neural network-based natural language processing model, we analyze a large
corpus of 267,907 China-related articles published by The New York Times since
1970. We then compare our output from The New York Times to a longitudinal data
set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public's views
on China. We find that the reporting of The New York Times on China in one year
explains 54% of the variance in American public opinion on China in the next.
Our result confirms hypothesized links between media and public opinion and
helps shed light on how mass media can influence public opinion of foreign
countries.
