Professor Fang Kecheng was recently awarded the Outstanding Dissertation Award of Chinese Communication Association (CCA).

Prof. Fang received his Ph.D. degree from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and joined CUHK in 2019. His dissertation is entitled Mapping Media Bias in China. Using both sophisticated computer assisted content analysis, network analysis, data visualization, and in-depth interviews with members of the Chinese media, he “maps” the ideological space inhabited by 31 major print, television, and online news media in China to better understand how these media do and often do not align themselves with the official ideology; assesses how this space has changed from 2010 to 2016; and uses his findings to develop a more adaptable and generalizable theory of media bias across time and across nations.

According to his nominator Prof. Michael X. Delli Carpini, “these original findings, and Kecheng’s interpretation of them, not only provide a more nuanced, insightful picture of the Chinese media landscape than has prior research, but also provide a more globally and comparatively useful model and method for studying national media eco-systems than existing theory and methods allow. I consider this dissertation to be a major contribution to the field, and one of the best I have supervised in my 40 plus years as a PhD advisor.”

Congratulations to Kecheng!