The Government, The Market, The Media And The Others

"News is a window on the world"."The view through a window depends upon whether the window is large or small,has many panes or few,whether the glass is opaque or clear,whether the window faces a street or a backyard".Tuchman adopted this vivid analogy to make his point that news is manufactured and confined to its frames,media reality is not a true reality but a reality manufactured by media organizations.But the problem is that we still have to count on media in order to understand reality and that seems to be the destiny.In that sense,based on understanding how media reality is constructed,can we ponder further on how news production could be more rationalized so that it better serves the society?The thesis explores news prodcution and its products from the perspective of sociology of knowledge.But rather than examining those existing factors that influence and restrict news prodcution in general,the study focuses on analyzing several social power factors in order to seek a better news production relations that helps the public be better informed.The study absorbs some basic ideas of power from Fo-ucault,Pierre Bourdieuand and Giddens,especially that power is scattered,productive and transformed and the notion of the dialectics of control.It regards the government(the ruling party),the market and the media as different subjects of social power,and discusses how they influence and interact with news production in China.It also attempts to introduce in public power represented by academia and various NGOs in order to construct more ideal institutional space for news production.The concept of social power in this study is a general description of social powers that influence news production,and is different from that of political study and legal study.After reviewing various approaches to the study of news production in the west,Schudson commented that,'they either lack a historical perspective or do poor in comparative study','the motive for media study is often conceived when there is a lack of comparative perspective';and in his view of point,the drawback in the study of news production 'also harms its long-term value as a social science.'.Lee also thinks that 'American and British media scholars often ignores the perspective of comparison,and their theoretical frames derive from industiralized and politically stable countries,and can't fully interprete complex experiences of the third world.'The thesis seeks to understand how media institutions and media professionals engage in news production embedded in China's political,economic and cultural contexts,and how various social powers influence and interact with the construct of media reality.There is a general and historical description of how these social powers are formed and changed,in order to track down their appraoches and specific roles. But the purpose of the study is not to uncover how media reality is constructed and structured in China,but to search for a professionally institutionalized space that is compatible to Chinese reality and benefits news productionIn the second chapter Contexts of News Production in China,the study starts with discussion of entry permit system and politicians run the newspapers,which are considered to feature the contexts of news production in China as internal institutional arrangement and external dominant notion.These two set the prerequisite for news production and arrange basic elements accordingly.Even after China has carried out open-door policy for more than thirty years,social practice of news production still drastically conflicts with traditional mentality and system,from which subtle and profound changes of news production relationship,methods of production and news products could be observed.In that sense,the contexts of news production in China, which are featured by both levels of institution and notion,are not the result of a dominant power that controls media professionals and their production,as many political economy media scholars and critical cultural study scholars thought.Nor is it only a backdrop of news production process as held by some liberal pluralists and interpretive sociologists.The study unfolds the contexts of news production in China as the starting point,and also makes use of the logic of changes as the methodology, in support of a dose of optimism towards some hidden ultimate care.In terms of tangible news production,the relationship between media and government or the ruling party,is mainly reflected by media relationship with party propganda offices at different levels.The third chapter Propganda Management discusses major cases as political studies movement,propganda policy notice and collective media campaign;explains how they become part of techniques of domination and mingle with technologies of the self to play in news production.The study borrows the concept of techniques of domination from Fo-ucault to describe external factors that influence media professionals and their production,and uses the concept of technologies of the self to describe how media companies and media professionals respond actively to techniques of domination(not passively);and articulates these two concepts with Gidden's concepts of structure and action.The study tends to regard what really exists in news production is featured by conflicts through cooperation,and cooperation through conflicts,rather than the dichotomy of conflict and cooperation.In that sense,improvisation or strategic breakout,just to name some of the summaries by meida scholars,all suggest that the institutionalized space of media prodcution has been constructed and broken over and over.Also in this sense,news production is the reproduction of news production relations.The fourth chapter The Logics of the Market,based on Marxist exposition of three social forms and a sociological analysis of media marketization,analyzes in depth the relationship between market logic and news production.The argument is that during the process of media marketization,alienation and sublation of alienation actually take the same path.It is biased to simply criticize or praise media marketization.The history of media is part of the social history,and media marketization is one inevitable phase the media has to go through,which could be exploited in order to transform traditional news production relations,reduce the range of alienation,and develop capability of news production.Based on different explanations of professionalism from approaches of functionalism and social interaction theory,the fifth chapter In Pursuit of Professionalism analyzes several surveys,and tends to consider that within Chinese contexts,it is more realistic to regard the pursuit of professionalism as the pursuit of professional power,or the construct of ideology of professional power.The pursuit of professional power by media and media professionals is necessary and justified for the society,and so is the construct of ideology of professional power.Professional power for the media is only one kind of powers and professional powers,and has the same problem to deal with the relations to other powers and the issue of check and balance.Acutally that is all the more reason to construct a more reasonable institutionalized space for the media and media professionals.The study suggests tthat institutionalized space compose of government,market,media,academia and various NGOs to represent other social powers.In that case it could become a complex field in which each power could serve as part of reflective monitoring system and their roles would be difined and confined at the level of institutional arrangement,hence the the dialectics of control could be in place and contributes to the progress of Chinese society.