On Decoding The Thick Description For News Report's Audiece

Stuart Hall proposed a model for interpreting the communicator's ideology in his theory of Encoding/Decoding. The encoding phase produces the meaning of TV program, in which the ideology of producers is dominant. He emphasized the preferred meaning of producers in TV programs. The phase of TV program production is the phase of information's being put into the producers' frame of ideology. In the phase of decoding, audience has the power. The same information can be decoded in different ways. He held that there were three ways of decoding corresponding to the social status of the audience.This research is a qualitative research according to Hall's classical theory. We hope to find how this western theory spread in China and how ideology works when audience in Shanghai watch TV. The research is divided into two parts.In the first part, we study the encoding in the TV program "News Reports". We choose the program with high audience ratings. We analyze the program's context, and point out what the "preferred meaning" is and how the "preferred meaning" is put into the voice and picture of the TV news.In the second part, we discuss the decoding process. We visited 12 families with different demographic features, studying, through ethnographic methods, focus group interview and discourse analysis, their behavior of watching News Reports.We do our research in two aspects. One is audience's understanding of news itself, the other is their understanding of the ideology in the news. During the research, we find three ways of understanding the news itself and three inclinations in understanding ideology. From these, we develop a new way to TV audience research.The study gives fresh materials by "in-depth description". We find that audience's decoding of the TV news meaning is far more complex than Hall's model. The audience's reading inclination has nothing to do with their social class. And their ability to understand is far beyond our imagination.