From News Coverage to Public Discourse: Dual Agendas of China-Related Issues in Singapore's Mainstream Media and Reddit

Introduction

In a platformized communication environment, national image is no longer shaped exclusively by institutional news organizations. Public understanding of countries now develops across professional journalism, social media platforms, and user-driven discussion spaces (Katzenbach & Pentzold, 2024; Zeng, Abidin, & Schäfer, 2021), where issues can be selected, recirculated, and reinterpreted by multiple actors, including organizations and the publics that form around them (Bayer et al., 2020; Boynton & Richardson, 2016; Dawson, 2018). This transformation is particularly important for international communication because cross-border issues no longer move only through top-down news flows. They are also negotiated through platform publics in which users express attitudes, connect international events to local concerns, and assign new meanings to institutional narratives.

China is a particularly important case for examining this process. As a major object of international news and geopolitical debate, China is represented not only through state communication and global media coverage but also through localized public discussion outside both China and the West (Liu, 2024). Comparable dynamics of digital nationalism and identity-related discourse are visible within China's own platform ecosystem as well (Peng, 2022), underscoring that platformized publics, whether domestic or transnational, actively negotiate national image rather than simply receiving it. Focusing on such a third-country setting makes it possible to examine how national image is reconstructed through regional media institutions and local digital publics rather than treating international communication as a binary contest between Chinese and Western narratives.

Singapore provides a distinctive context for this comparison. Its mainstream press remains institutionally influential within a media system historically shaped by close relations between journalism, regulation, and state power (George, 2012). At the same time, China-related communication in Singapore is not organized through a single linguistic or journalistic arena. Lianhe Zaobao and The Straits Times address different language publics and situate China-related events within different regional and geopolitical news conventions. Research comparing China–US trade-conflict coverage across several national contexts also demonstrates the value of Singapore as a transnational communication site rather than as a simple extension of either Chinese or Western media discourse (Liu, 2024).

Alongside these institutional outlets, r/Singapore provides a user-driven discussion space in which China-related issues are recontextualized through anonymous participation, conversational interaction, and locally specific concerns. The subreddit should not be treated as representative of the entire Singapore public; nevertheless, it offers an analytically useful platform public in which users make issues visible, respond to news, and articulate interpretations that may converge with or depart from mainstream media priorities (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013; Yang & Taylor, 2021). Similar dynamics have been documented in other networked contexts, where collective sense-making and conflict-avoidant sharing behavior shape how information circulates beyond institutional control (Chadwick, Vaccari, & Hall, 2024).

This study therefore compares China-related agendas across Lianhe Zaobao, The Straits Times, and r/Singapore. It asks not only which issues receive attention but also which substantive and affective attributes are attached to those issues. By distinguishing issue salience from interpretive convergence, the paper examines whether partial overlap in visibility coexists with divergence in framing, emotional expression, and public meaning-making.

Literature Review and Theoretical Framework

First-Level Agenda Setting: Issue Salience

Agenda-setting theory begins from the proposition that the prominence and repetition of issues in news can structure their relative importance in public attention (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). At the first level, the central concern is issue salience: which issues are made more visible than others and how those issues are ordered within an agenda (Kiousis, McDevitt, & Wu, 2005; McCombs & Valenzuela, 2020). The first level therefore addresses the salience of topics rather than the transfer of a specific opinion about them. In digital media environments, this ordering may emerge across several communicative arenas rather than from a single institutional source, making partial correspondence and divergence between media and platform agendas especially important to examine (Boynton & Richardson, 2016; Neuman et al., 2014).

In this study, first-level salience is operationalized through the distribution of China-related content across eight topic categories: politics, economy, diplomacy, technology, culture, security, society, and other. This level corresponds directly to the issue-identification components of the research questions: RQ1 identifies the topics discussed on Reddit, RQ2 identifies the topics emphasized by mainstream media, and RQ3 compares the degree to which the two agenda structures converge or diverge. Because the study uses comparative content analysis rather than a public-opinion survey or a time-lagged design, the analysis assesses aggregate agenda correspondence and difference; it does not claim that mainstream coverage causally determines Reddit discussion or that individual news reports should produce corresponding posts.

Second-Level Agenda Setting: Attribute Salience

Second-level agenda setting extends the analysis from issues to the attributes associated with those issues. It asks not only whether an object such as China is visible, but which characteristics, evaluations, and interpretive emphases become salient when that object is discussed (Carroll & McCombs, 2003; McCombs & Valenzuela, 2020). These attributes may be substantive, such as cooperation, threat, responsibility, or neutral description, or affective, expressed through positive, neutral, or negative evaluation. This distinction is especially relevant to international communication because a country can remain prominent across media while being connected to different geopolitical, economic, or moral meanings (Wong & Mulupi, 2024).

The present study operationalizes substantive attributes through frame categories and affective attributes through emotional tone. Framing and second-level agenda setting overlap in their attention to issue interpretation, but they are not treated as interchangeable concepts (Weaver, 2007); the analysis uses frames as observable indicators of which substantive attributes are emphasized. In relation to the research questions, RQ1 examines the emotional or attitudinal tendencies visible in Reddit discussion, with comments serving only as supplementary evidence of how users interpret and evaluate the issues introduced by original posts. RQ2 examines how mainstream media frame China-related issues, while RQ3 considers whether issues that appear across both arenas are associated with similar or different interpretive attributes.

The study is deliberately limited to the first and second levels of agenda setting. Third-level, or network agenda-setting, research examines patterns of association among issues and attributes (Ding, 2025; Guo & Liu, 2022; Vu, Guo, & McCombs, 2014), but the present analysis does not construct or compare such networks. The exploratory LDA analysis identifies recurring themes within Reddit discourse and is therefore treated as a supplementary analytical tool rather than as evidence of third-level agenda-setting effects.

Agenda Relations in Platformized Publics

Classical agenda-setting research often focuses on the relationship between media agendas and public issue priorities, but platformized environments make that relationship less linear (Jungherr & Schroeder, 2021). Users can respond to, reinterpret, amplify, and depart from institutional news priorities (Kroon & Van der Meer, 2021; Towner & Muñoz, 2020), while visible discussion is also shaped by networked participation and platform-specific interaction (Boynton & Richardson, 2016; Neuman et al., 2014; Yang & Sun, 2021). Studies of networked gatekeeping (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013) and autonomous public communities (Yang & Taylor, 2021) similarly show that public discourse can reorganize the meaning of issues rather than merely repeat the agendas introduced by news institutions. This reorganization is visible both in what draws sustained user attention (Araujo & van der Meer, 2020) and in how users selectively engage with content that aligns with their existing views (Messing & Westwood, 2014).

Accordingly, the present study treats the mainstream media and Reddit agendas as related but non-equivalent structures. This divergence between institutional and lay interpretive frameworks is not unique to agenda-related discourse: comparative research on public understandings of algorithmic information environments similarly finds that lay explanations of information homogeneity diverge from academic accounts, and that this divergence itself takes different forms across national contexts such as the US and China (Zhang & Yang, 2025). This comparative pattern lends broader support to treating institutional and platform agendas as related but non-equivalent, rather than assuming that public discourse simply mirrors institutional discourse.

For this reason, the study distinguishes between different units and communicative functions within Reddit. Original posts are treated as the principal agenda-bearing units because they introduce and organize visible discussion topics. Comments are treated as nested interpretive responses that reveal how users evaluate, localize, and emotionalize those topics. They are not combined with news articles or used as one-to-one equivalents in the primary cross-platform comparison.

Singapore as a Third-Country Media Context

Singapore is theoretically important because it combines an institutionally structured mainstream press with multilingual and platform-based spaces of public discussion. George (2012) shows that Singaporean journalism must be understood within a broader socio-political environment in which press institutions, governance, and public communication are closely connected. This context makes the mainstream agenda more than a neutral collection of news topics: issue selection and narrative restraint are embedded in a distinctive media environment.

At the same time, Singapore's position as a regional communication node enables China-related issues to be interpreted through local, regional, and transnational concerns. Liu's (2024) comparative study of China–US trade-conflict news illustrates how Singaporean coverage can participate in cross-national agenda construction while retaining a distinct media position. Comparable patterns of Chinese-media agenda construction on international platforms have also been documented on Twitter (Wang Yingji & Shi Wei, 2023), reinforcing the value of examining how China-related agendas travel through non-domestic platforms and outlets. Comparing mainstream news with r/Singapore therefore reveals how China's image is reconstructed not only between states or media systems but also between institutional journalism and localized platform publics.

Taken together, the framework preserves the study's dual-agenda design. The first level addresses what is made salient in mainstream news and Reddit posts, while the second level addresses how those issues are characterized and evaluated. RQ1 focuses on the Reddit agenda and its accompanying emotional or attitudinal expression, RQ2 focuses on the mainstream media agenda and its framing, and RQ3 compares the two arenas for convergence, divergence, and an agenda gap. This alignment allows the study to examine cross-platform differences without treating news articles, posts, and comments as equivalent units or making causal claims that the research design cannot support.

Research Questions

Methodology

Research Design and Corpus

The study uses comparative content analysis supported by supplementary computational analysis. The corpus covers January to May 2025 and includes China-related content from two mainstream media outlets and r/Singapore. The design compares the distributions and attributes of issues across corpora; it does not test causal agenda-setting effects or infer that temporal similarity demonstrates direct influence.

Mainstream Media Corpus

The mainstream media corpus consists of China-related coverage from Lianhe Zaobao and The Straits Times. A total of 1,350 articles were collected from Lianhe Zaobao's native China section. The Straits Times corpus initially contained 1,249 reports from its China section; after 22 abnormal or incomplete records were removed, 1,227 valid articles remained. Collecting from native topic sections rather than relying solely on keyword searches reduces issue-selection bias introduced by researcher-chosen search terms and preserves broader coverage within each outlet's own classification system.

Reddit Corpus and Units of Analysis

The Reddit corpus was collected from r/Singapore using the search terms "China," "PRC," and "Chinese" for the same January–May 2025 period. The dataset contains 129 original posts and 10,590 recursively collected comments. After 162 empty or deleted comments were removed, 10,428 valid comments remained. Post-level records include title, body text, date, score, comment count, and link; comment-level records include text, score, and nesting depth. Data were collected in Python using the PRAW library. Because the corpus is based on keyword-retrieved subreddit content rather than a probability sample, it represents visible China-related discussion within r/Singapore rather than the views of the Singapore population as a whole.

News articles and Reddit original posts are the primary units used to compare issue salience across platforms. Comments have a different communicative function: they are nested, interdependent responses that elaborate the meanings of posts. Accordingly, comment data are analyzed within the Reddit corpus to identify emotional tendencies, evaluative language, and interpretive extensions. Comment counts or sentiment frequencies are not directly compared with article counts, and comments are not treated as equivalent to complete news reports.

Coding and Analytical Procedures

First-level agenda setting is examined by classifying articles and original posts into eight topic categories: politics, economy, diplomacy, technology, culture, security, society, and other. Frequency and proportional distributions are used to identify issue salience. Second-level analysis examines substantive attributes through frame categories, including cooperation, threat, responsibility attribution, and neutral description, applied to the two mainstream media corpora, where consistent reporting conventions make reliable frame classification feasible. Because informal, multi-topic, and often ironic Reddit language does not map reliably onto these news-oriented categories, Reddit's second-level attributes are instead examined through descriptive analysis of emotional expression and close reading of high-interaction comment threads, illustrated in the case study reported below.

Word-frequency analysis and visualization are used to identify recurring lexical emphases surrounding shared issues. LDA topic modeling is applied only to the Reddit textual corpus as an exploratory supplement that identifies latent thematic clusters, consistent with a broader turn toward computational and automated techniques in journalism and communication research (Lewis, Guzman, & Schmidt, 2019). It is not treated as the core comparative method, does not replace manual topic and attribute coding, and is not used as a direct metric for comparing mainstream media with Reddit.

Findings

Issue Salience Across Platforms

Figure 1 compares the first-level issue agendas of the three corpora. Lianhe Zaobao shows the strongest concentration on politics (955 articles, 70.7%) and diplomacy (253 articles, 18.7%), meaning that these two categories account for nearly nine-tenths of its China-related coverage. The Straits Times also prioritizes politics (612 articles) and diplomacy (367 articles), although its coverage contains a larger economic and technological component. Reddit original posts are less concentrated: technology (25 posts) and economy (23 posts) are among the most visible categories, while a large "other" category reflects cross-cutting or difficult-to-classify discussion. The primary comparison in Figure 1 is therefore between article-level and post-level topic distributions, not between news articles and individual comments.

Shared Issues and Divergent Interpretive Contexts

The corpora are not completely separate in issue visibility. Figure 2 shows that "tariff" is a recurring term across Lianhe Zaobao, The Straits Times, and Reddit, indicating cross-platform salience around trade conflict. Yet the surrounding lexical patterns differ. Lianhe Zaobao's word pattern emphasizes reporting sources, interviewed experts, and institutional statements; The Straits Times places tariffs within policy and geopolitical contexts; Reddit connects the issue more frequently to people, countries, time, and practical consequences. Shared issue salience therefore does not produce equivalent substantive attributes or interpretive emphasis.

Reddit comments clarify how this interpretive divergence develops within platform discussion. In a highly interactive thread titled "Singapore to face 10% tariffs from the US today onwards," more than 600 comments moved from the initial policy announcement to comparisons among Singapore, China, Vietnam, and other regional actors. The top comment, which received over 700 upvotes, stated simply,

"Our ASEAN neighbours are hit the worst"

"Maybe just a coincidence, but popular AI models suggest similar formulas… it's almost hilarious at this point."

This material is not used as a one-to-one comparison with news articles. Instead, it demonstrates the supplementary role of comments: they do not merely restate the topic introduced by the post but extend it through comparative reasoning, procedural skepticism toward policy legitimacy, and an ironic tone that is largely absent from the more restrained institutional framing found in Lianhe Zaobao and The Straits Times.

Frame-Type Distribution and Institutional Voice

Coding of frame categories across the two mainstream media outlets provides further evidence of this second-level divergence, shown in Figure 3. Lianhe Zaobao's coverage was coded predominantly as cooperation-oriented (972 articles), with smaller shares coded as neutral description (273), responsibility attribution (58), and threat (47), indicating that even when covering contested issues such as tariffs, the outlet's institutional voice leans toward framing China-related developments in cooperative or diplomatically measured terms. The Straits Times, by contrast, was coded almost entirely as neutral description (1,227 articles), consistent with its detached, breaking-news reporting style. Reddit posts are not included in this comparison: as noted above, their informal, multi-topic, and often ironic language did not map reliably onto these four news-oriented frame categories, so Reddit's interpretive patterns are instead examined qualitatively through the comment-level case study discussed above rather than forced into the same coding scheme. These counts should be interpreted as the dominant institutional frame under the coding scheme, rather than as evidence that individual articles contain no evaluative meaning.

Affective Attributes and Emotional Expression

The second-level analysis also points to different affective environments across platforms. Mainstream news coverage is dominated by restrained, neutral language, consistent with the frame-coding results reported above, whereas Reddit discussion is more evaluative and emotionally expressive, as illustrated by the tariff thread discussed earlier, in which users moved between data-based reasoning, skepticism, and open irony. Because comment-level sentiment was not coded against a validated, article-comparable metric, this affective contrast is reported here as a qualitative pattern rather than a quantified cross-platform comparison; developing a directly comparable sentiment measure across articles, posts, and comments is left for future work.

Exploratory LDA Analysis of Reddit Discussion

The exploratory LDA analysis identifies five recurring semantic clusters in the Reddit corpus: immigration and identity; tariff politics and international dynamics; online culture and emotional expression; local politics and government commentary; and cost of living and risk perception. These clusters reinforce the manual observation that China-related issues are frequently connected to localized and experience-based concerns.

Figure 4 is used only to contextualize the Reddit discussion and generate interpretive insight. It is not the core basis for the cross-platform comparison and does not establish algorithmic causation.

Cross-Platform Agenda Divergence

Taken together, the findings answer RQ3 by showing partial correspondence at the level of issue visibility and stronger divergence at the level of interpretation. Politics, diplomacy, trade, and tariffs circulate across more than one arena, but mainstream outlets and Reddit organize those issues through different emphases. Mainstream media retain a comparatively institutional and macro-level agenda, whereas Reddit posts and comments connect China-related issues to local politics, identity, everyday costs, risk, and public sentiment. The study describes this pattern as an agenda gap, but it does not infer that mainstream coverage caused Reddit discussion or that platform mechanisms independently produced the observed differences.

Discussion

The findings refine agenda-setting theory by distinguishing salience convergence from interpretive convergence. First-level overlap is visible when an issue such as tariffs appears across mainstream and platform agendas. However, second-level analysis shows that the same issue can be attached to different substantive and affective attributes. Agenda correspondence should therefore not be assumed merely because similar keywords or topics appear across corpora.

The Singapore context is central to this pattern. Lianhe Zaobao and The Straits Times operate within an institutionally structured media environment, but they address different language publics and organize China-related news through distinct journalistic emphases. r/Singapore adds another layer in which China is discussed through localized concerns and informal public judgment. This third-country perspective moves the analysis beyond a China–West binary and shows how national image is rearticulated within a regional hybrid media environment (Chadwick, 2017; George, 2012; Liu, 2024).

Methodologically, the study also demonstrates why posts and comments should not be collapsed into a single public-agenda measure. Original posts provide a defensible unit for comparing issue salience with news articles, while comments reveal the interpretive and emotional extensions of those posts. Treating comments as supplementary evidence preserves their analytical value without overstating equivalence across very different text types. The same principle applies to LDA: it helps identify patterns within Reddit but does not serve as the principal cross-platform test.

The paper contributes to international communication by showing that national image is negotiated across institutional and platform arenas within a third-country context. It contributes to agenda-setting research by demonstrating that issue visibility, substantive attributes, and affective expression may follow different patterns across a hybrid media environment. Empirically, it provides a cross-platform framework that separates the agenda-bearing role of posts from the interpretive role of comments.

Limitations

Several limitations qualify the findings. First, the mainstream corpora are drawn from outlet-defined China sections, whereas Reddit is retrieved through keywords; the samples therefore reflect different platform architectures and selection procedures. Second, r/Singapore is not representative of Singapore's population, and comment activity is shaped by self-selection and nested interaction, consistent with broader evidence of unequal digital participation and disconnection across online populations (Nguyen & Hargittai, 2023). Third, the January–May 2025 design is comparative and cross-sectional, so it cannot establish temporal agenda transfer or causal influence. Fourth, the four-category frame scheme was applied only to the two mainstream media corpora, because informal and multi-topic Reddit discourse did not fit these news-oriented categories reliably; Reddit's interpretive patterns are instead examined qualitatively through comment-level case analysis, and extending a comparable attribute framework to platform discourse is left for future work. Fifth, comment-level sentiment is reported descriptively rather than through a validated, article-comparable metric. Finally, LDA is exploratory and should be interpreted alongside, rather than in place of, manual content analysis.

Conclusion

China-related issues in Singapore are constructed through overlapping but non-equivalent media agendas. Mainstream news concentrates on politics, diplomacy, and institutionally organized interpretations, while r/Singapore presents a more fragmented and localized agenda. Comments extend rather than replicate the post agenda by revealing how users attach emotion, personal experience, and local political meaning to China-related issues. The resulting agenda gap is therefore not simply a difference in topic frequency; it is also a difference in how shared issues are interpreted. By separating first-level salience, second-level attributes, and the distinct analytical roles of posts, comments, and exploratory topic modeling, the study provides a more defensible account of national-image construction within Singapore's hybrid media environment.

Beyond the Singapore case, these findings speak to a broader challenge facing international communication research in a platformized media landscape: national image can no longer be adequately understood through institutional news content alone, nor can platform discourse be treated as a simple extension of media agendas. As mainstream outlets and participatory platforms increasingly coexist as parallel arenas of meaning-making, comparative designs that separate salience from interpretation, and posts from comments, offer a more defensible way to trace how issues travel, and fail to travel, across institutional and public spheres. Building on the descriptive agenda gap identified here, future work will extend the comparison to a full calendar year of data and incorporate network agenda-setting analysis (Vu, Guo, & McCombs, 2014) to examine how clusters of China-related issues and attributes co-occur within and across platforms, offering a more relational picture of how national image is assembled in Singapore's hybrid media environment.