A Study Of Mass Media Effects On Political Trust In China

In recent years, the issue of the deficiency of political trust in china has been paid attention to by scholars at home and abroad. As one of the main mechanisms to convey political information, we focus on how mass media influence people's political trust. There are two hypotheses, media malaise and virtuous cycle between the relationship of mass media and political trust in western countries. However, mass media in china has its own characteristics distinctive from them, then, how does them influence political trust?This study is to inspect the effects of mass media on political trust in macro and micro level with the quantitative and qualitative study combined. The main results are as follows: in the quantitative study, questionnaire is used to investigate the samples' media use, media attention, media trust and political trust with different dimensions. We find that mass media have become one of the main sources of political information acquired by people, but people don't trust them so much. The level of political trust fluctuates in the average level and displays the difference between the center and the local. We use multiple hierarchical regression analysis to find that mass media have the positive and negative effects on political trust:newspaper use, newspaper attention, online news attention and online news trust have the negative effect on several dimensions of political trust; television news trust has a positive effect on two dimensions of political trust. In order to understand how different coverage influences those with different levels of political trust, on the basis of the results of quantitative study, we use the focus group to find the following results:those with lower level of political trust have higher level of political knowledge and higher ability of media information-processing, which makes positive propaganda in traditional media unable to exert any influence on them and even contradictory results. Those with higher level of political trust influenced more by Chinese cultural tradition of obeying the authority trust the traditional media more controlled by the government. Although the negative coverage can have a negative influence on their political trust, they still recognize the supervision function of the mass media and hope for the comprehensive and real information.At last, the study discusses media's function of positive propaganda, supervision toward political trust. The study finds out that positive propaganda function of traditional media is in the trend of weakening and effective propaganda should be based on credibility and recognition. At the same time, media's democratic supervision function makes people's political trust from traditional blind trust to democratic distrust. But we should be aware that good order of political life is the foundation of stabilization and development of a society, so some suggestions are mentioned in the network times in order to enhance people's political trust to realize virtuous cycle with Chinese characteristics.