Corruption Scandals In China: Media Frames And News Making

Corruption scandals is a kind of information that involves political figures (organization) who commit wrongdoings including breaking laws, institutions of party, and deviating from social morality and the public's expectation. To research the corruption scandals can open an area for observing the inter-action of media, politics and society. In this study,815 samples have been collected and analyzed to research on the features and laws of media representation and news-making process of corruption scandals.From this study, it can be seen that corruption scandals in China have features of rapid change of issue topics. The distribution of corruption scandals is related to the rank and status of officials. The amount of reports of corruption scandals is as pyramid-shape distribution with the rank of officials from the lower to the higher.As for the source of news, in addition to the usual sources, such as formal news outlets and organizational news publication, corruption scandals depend more on informal news outlets. Stories from Xinhua news agency are used widely, especially those of higher rank officials. Publishing corruption scandal stories from other media coverage is another way of corruption scandal reports for the city newspapers. As for the media frames of corruption scandals, the visibility is related to the rank of officials. In general, Chinese media tend to use simplified media frames; tend to do not mention causes leading to the wrongdoings, in the limited amount of causal analysis, personal causes are often be stressed rather than institutional reasons.The production of corruption scandals in china is influenced by various kinds of social fields like politics field, economy field, technology field and media news-making field, all of which are influential factors for the media to frame corruption scandals. Politics field plays the most important role among these factors. Research on the corruption scandals in China is helpful for study interaction between politics field and media field, for promoting anti-corruption movement and for exploring new ways of watchdog function of media.