This study investigated how newspaper headlines differ in reporting morally relevant content. Analyses compared the representation of four key moral domains (care, fairness, authority, and loyalty) in newspapers that differed on three variables: (1) organizational goals (market-appeal versus maintaining-government-control), (2) target audience (foreign versus domestic), and (3) nation of origin (China versus U.S.). Target audience was nested within the organizational goals condition of maintaining-government-control. A coding scheme based on logic underlying the model of intuitive morality and exemplars was applied to four purposely selected newspapers: People's Daily (representing government-controlled newspapers in China with domestic targets), and China Daily (representing government-controlled newspapers in China with foreign targets), Nanfang Metropolis Daily (representing market-appeal newspapers in China), The Washington Post (representing market-appeal newspapers in the U.S.). Results show patterns consistent with two predictions. First, among government-controlled newspapers, those targeting domestic readers were more likely to report stories featuring authority than those targeting foreign readers (H3a supported). Second, the Chinese market-appeal newspaper demonstrated a tendency to report stories featuring fairness more often than its government-controlled counterpart (H2b supported). In addition to these predicted finding, noteworthy patterns unrelated to any hypothesis indicated that a) the market-appeal newspapers tended to report more on authority than the government-controlled newspaper targeting foreign readers; and b) the market-appeal newspapers both in China and in the U.S. tended to report more on fairness than the Chinese government-controlled newspaper targeting foreign readers.
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