Colin Sparks是英国著名媒体研究专家、英国威斯敏斯特大学“传播与媒体研究中心”（CAMRI）主任。2008年“传播与媒体研究中心”（CAMRI）在全英媒体研究中心正式排名中名列第一。Colin Sparks教授曾就读于萨塞克斯大学、牛津大学和伯明翰大学，并从伯明翰大学“当代文化研究中心”获得文化研究博士学位。Colin Sparks教授的兴趣广泛，并不仅限于文化研究。他的近作更是较多地关注政治经济传统研究而非文化研究。他所撰写的文章涉及大众传播众多领域，主要的兴趣在于媒体与不同社会权力之间的不同关系形式。他的撰写和编辑了许多著作，最新一本是于2007年由SAGE出版公司在英国出版的专著“Development Globalization and the Mass Media”。此书中文版《全球化和大众媒体》将由中国社科文献出版社于2009年12月翻译出版。目前Colin Sparks教授正致力于对经历着广泛而迅速转型的社会中媒体的比较研究，预计该研究结果将于2010公布。除此之外，Colin Sparks教授更是经常来中国访问并在中国多所大学举办了演讲。
Colin Sparks is Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster, in London. In 2008 CAMRI was officially recognised as the best research centre in media and cultural studies in the UK. Professor Sparks was educated at Sussex, Oxford and Birmingham universities and holds a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham. His more recent work, however, is better described as lying within the tradition of political economy rather than cultural studies. He has written extensively on many areas of the mass media but his main field of interest is on the ways in which the media relate to different forms of social power. He has written and edited several books, the most recent, published in English by Sage in 2007, and in Chinese in December 2009 by the Social Science Academic Press, is Development, Globalization and the Mass Media (全球化和大众媒体，中国社科文献出版社). His current research is a comparative study of the media in societies that are undergoing rapid and extensive social change and he hopes to publish the results in 2010. Professor Sparks is a regular visitor to China and he has lectured at several universities in China
This lecture reports on a project to study the representation of China in the UK national daily press during 2008. There are several studies of the coverage of China in the foreign press, often in comparison with Chinese coverage. These studies usually concentrate only on the elite press, for example the New York Times and the Washington Post. While this tells us what a small section of the population are able to read about China, it tells us nothing about what the vast mass of the population, who read other newspapers or no newspapers at all, are learning about China. This study includes all 10 of the UK national daily papers, both those aimed at the elite and those aimed at a popular audience. The overall pattern of coverage of China is analysed quantitatively and compared to the results of previous international studies about foreign news. It is found that this coverage corresponds well to expectations derived from the theory of international news. A more detailed qualitative study of three different papers, from different market segments, is then discussed, demonstrating very sharp differences between the kinds of stories and the ways they are handled in these papers. The framing employed by the more popular newspapers produces a distinctly hostile tone, while the elite newspaper has a more nuanced and sympathetic framing of China
