Media framing of traditional Chinese medicine and its public health implications: a cross-national panel analysis of news coverage in the US, UK, and Europe (2010-2024).

Résumé

INTRODUCTION: Western media framing of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) shapes public health beliefs and policy attitudes across national contexts, yet systematic cross-national evidence remains limited.METHODS: This study analyzed TCM-related news coverage across six Western countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, from 2010 to 2024. Using a unified four-category coding framework applied to a multilingual corpus of elite print and online outlets, we constructed a balanced panel of 360 country-quarter observations and employed two-way fixed effects regression models to examine cross-national variation in frame distribution and sentiment orientation.RESULTS: Risk/safety frames dominated in the United States (38.4%) and the United Kingdom (35.1%), whereas scientific/efficacy frames prevailed in Germany (41.2%) and France (37.8%). The COVID-19 pandemic improved overall sentiment ( = 0.14,