Research on the Change of Agenda Building in the Reports of Human Trafficking

Abstract

Human trafficking has always been of great public interest as a highly damag-ing crime. Since 2011, the number of reports on trafficking on micro-blogs has continued to increase, and the media have begun to be selective and change their coverage of this issue. This study uses four representative media, namely Peo-ple’s Daily, The Paper, Beijing News, and China Women’s Daily, to study the re-ports on trafficking published on micro-blogs between 2011 and 2022 using con-tent analysis. The study found that the media’s coverage of human trafficking has distinctive features, with the two main narrative frameworks being ’presentation of facts’ and ’law and policy’, while the focus and portrayal of trafficking in the media have changed over time, with different media orientation of trafficking in different time periods.