The Mass Media’s Participation In Public Policy

The essence of the mass media’s participation in public policy is not only to promote "the public nature"of the public policy,but also embody the mass media’s discourse mechanism as public space. This dissertation takes the media’s participation practice of the New Medical Reform in the policy process as case study, discussing the complicated states and charceteristics in this process, investigating how the mass media participate in and influence the process of the public policy in the times of transformation,and analyzing the interaction between news production and social control behind the process as well.The dissertation tries to reveal the complicated and real characteristics of news production and power regulation in public participation,in order to provide typical realistic basis for the mass media’s public discourse practice in the complex network of power relationship.Basing on the qualitative research method, this dissertation selected five domestic newspapers’reports in the process of the New Medical Reform and studied the interactions with the other medias,surveyed the media’s performance in the three stages of policy agenda building, policy deliberation and policy identity.During the policy agenda building stage,the mass media transformed the social problems from the public issues to the policy agenda through media agenda building. The media has played an important role as the mechanism of problems integration, presenting the strategy discourse framework, and echoing between one another. During the policy deliberation stage,different types of media provide different groups of people with spaces to express their interests. Although the official discourse control still exists, the dynamic performance of the public and the media breaks the official discourse hegemony; the dominant discourse in social interest expression is made by the public intellectual,and ordinary people’s discourse presentation is weakening. During the policy identity stage, the media’s function of "propaganda"has not changed and still be strengthened by mainstream ideology.The media’s function of communication and feedback is being restricted,but different types of media have somewhat different performances.This dissertation argues that different public discourse expressions mainly depend on the restrictive relationship between various factors such as politics,market,media and public participation consciousness. Being the public sphere of discourse expression, Chinese media are "extemporizing" occasionally in the existing institutional framework.In order to realize the democratic function as public sphere, mass media need to balance well the relationship between media, government, market and public in an active and reasonable way. In some sense,this depends on the efforts of today’s social transformation to a modern society of political democratization, national legalization, economic marketization and cultural diversity.