A Comparative Study On The Reports About“Comfort Woman” In Newspapers From Cross-Strait Media

The film Twenty Two was initially released in China's mainland in 2017,which caused a buzz about this topic later,suddenly,what was once forgotten by the public became the hotspot in the news reports.Women who had suffered from this during the World War ? became a part of the history in some countries or regions,China,as the biggest victim of this event,had revealed those women's hardships with the help of many scholars and volunteers,at the same time,Taiwan also had a tough time during the Japanese colonial period when the comfort women were part of its history.How would the media in both sides interpret the subject-comfort woman-under the discussion,since they had various values caused by the separated society,culture and history? And what's the difference in the light of the news discourse? If so,where could we find them? In this article,we will try,from a comparative perspective,to tease out the medium image,character depiction and news reporting discourse from the Cross-Strait,which was based on the relevant news reports from China Youth News and Liberty Times News.Studies show that these two newspapers shared similar medium image and character depiction,while the difference was the former paid more attention to the commemorative reports and the studies from both experts and volunteers,which varied in the type of writing and was rich in comments from the media,showing a misery image of the comfort women and building a victim image in the war;the latter emphasized on the materials among the people and presented a simple style featuring various photos,with authors' comments occasionally displayed in the news,tending to present the optimistic and easy lives of the comfort women and lay stress on woman's rights.The former featured nationalism in view of the news reporting discourse,which was normalized in the choice of words and rule-based and serious means of expression,giving us an authoritative and rigorous image,whose intertextuality directly reflected in the discourse and the usage of the historical data.The latter embodied the discourse of “province and nationality”,with a huge sense of localization and politics,which featured direct and free usage of words and neglected the literary form,showing the colloquial form of expression and the trend of popularization and commercialization in the media industry,and its intertextuality was represented in the indirect discourse and continuity of the news reporting.