From Organizational Communication To Mass Communication

China is now entering the fifth crisis outburst period. Crisis coverage is an important issue facing Chinese media in the modern society. However, due to the constraints of traditional news value and news policies, there are many obvious problems within the crisis coverage. The outbreak of SARS crisis in 2003 has led to the full recognition of the necessity of improving Chinese media's public crisis coverage. The research on crisis is now a hot topic of management and sociology.A careful review of public crisis coverage of contemporary China reveals that the dominant factor that affects its change is the relationship between government and mass media, more specifically, the compromise and conflicts between the two ----government political control and professionalism ideology in journalism practice of different times. The thesis argues that organizational communication in public crisis is representing the power of government, which can forbid, restrict and influence mass media in content or format of news coverage.; while Mass communication in crisis means the news independence and represents right to know. The past twenty years witnessed a tendency in public crisis communication, which is from organizational communication to mass communication. In some type's crisis, the influences from the political power decrease and crisis news coverage become open and transparency. The purpose of this thesis is trying to find out the dynamic between organizational communication and mass communication in public crisis communication. For fulfill this, this thesis imports two key concepts in communication theory, organizational communication and mass communication, to analyze the complicated relationships between the government and the mass media in public crisis communication. In china, mass media traditionally were regarded as one channel of propagation, which acts as accessorial part of formal public organizational (political) communication. The past twenty years witnessed the increasing independency of Chinese mass media, which is caused by both economical and political factors .Besides , less governmental interfere and influence on mass media lead obscurations to the return of publicity. But reality is always complicated, past ideology still exist and have effects on the public crisis communication so that there are some Game phenomena in news coverage in public crisis communication.According to the relationships between organizational communication and mass communication in public crisis communication, five patterns are constructed to describe the communication status in public crisis, including organizational communication pattern, preferential communication pattern, parallel communication pattern, dominant communication pattern and mass communication pattern. Each pattern exists in crisis communication till today, and presents different and complicated relationship between government and media. Finally, thesis also does some forecasts on development of public crisis communication, which based on analysis of reality.