Representation And Social Reality Construction: A Representational Study Of The Peasants On Main Chinese Newspapers

After analysis of some news and reports of People ' s Daily and Peasant' s Daily, the author discusses some problems of the peasants' representation. It has been found that People ' s Daily always gives the readers a kind of misrepresentation of peasants as a comprehensive newspaper, while as a special media for peasants, Peasant' s Daily always gives the people a kind of underrepresented images of peasants. The difference can be found in two ways: one is the fundamental features of the peasants, the media tend to choose middle age, male, rural cadre, the other is the gap between reality peasant life and the life reflected by the media, hence the peasants' representations by the main national newspapers are not real and sufficient, those images are also getting stereotyped. All the images embody an unequal political power relationship and Chinese traditional gender power relationship. In addition, the dissertation gives the main reasons that have caused this representation, and finally, as for how to improve this condition, the author gives some pieces of advice.