Caught between state and society: The commercial news media in China

Since beginning of the Reform Era in the late 1970s, the Chinese mass media have evolved from state-financed tools for the dissemination of state propaganda to highly commercialized state-owned enterprises dependent upon advertising revenue for survival. This dissertation examined the extent to which the print and broadcast news media have served two masters: the Chinese Communist Party, which attempted to dictate news content to bolster regime legitimacy, and the consumer, who preferred uncensored news reports, which occasionally portray the one-party state in a negative light. The use of qualitative methods explored pressures that have challenged state capacity to control the media, including decentralization of media management, market competition, journalistic professionalization and global information flows. Case studies on the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic in 2003 and Taiwan presidential election in 2004 as well as quantitative analysis of 5,883 news reports revealed the extent to which news content was controlled by the Communist Party. In spite of growing pressures affecting news media operations, the Communist Party has proven remarkably successful at re-making its capacity to control the media, preventing the rise of ideological threats to regime survival transmitted through news reports, and utilizing the mass media to dominate political discourse in China.