A Discourse Perspective: How Our Media Frame The Rural Migrants

This study focuses on the newspaper reports about rural migrants of People Daily, Southern Metropolis Daily and Southern Weekend in 2004, trying to find out the power, which affect these rural migrants reports. First, through analyzing these reports, we can find the images of the rural migrants are vague and not integral, because the daily life of the rural migrants is neglected by these three newspapers. And there are some discriminatory words in some reports. What's more, in almost all these newspaper reports, the rural migrants never show up as the subject of the discourse. Second, through deeply inquiring into the samples with theories of discourse, I find that there are altogether three different forms of discourse. These three forms of discourse are political discourse dominated by ideology, the plural discourse dominated by marketplace logic and the social elite discourse. Thirdly, I investigate the mechanism that the media formulate the different forms of discourse on the contemporary background. I find that the disintegration of the stratum deeply affects the re-distribution of the media source and power. Thus, three classes turns up, the strong group who dominate the media source, the middle class as the majority of the target market and the weak group who is on the margin of the communication. The final part is my appeal that the mass media should take the responsibility to speak for the rural migrants.