Entertainment Culture And Ideology

Being the most popular and influential mass media, television plays a vital role in the recent 'golden age' of entertainment. As the weathercock of Chinese television entertainment trend, Hunan Satellite Television (aka, Hunan TV), which has set its position under the Brand of 'Happy China', has already claimed to produce its channel as the 'most energetic telly brand of entertainment' while making considerable profit as well as social influence. However, what behind the slogan of 'Happy China' are actually two kinds of intertwining ideological discourse construction both affected and infiltrated by each other. The process of their construction has also reflected the social practical foundation relied on which our media has managed to survive. Under the cultural production new order in modern China, Hunan TV has found its strategy of position-setting and development as' advocating advanced cultural of socialism by combing entertainment and the concern of public welfare'. Such strategy was to be realized through discourse construction from entertainment to mainstream ideology.In view of recent study about 'Happy China' of Hunan TV that has failed to unfold its cultural meaning sufficiently, this paper is designed to adopt a discourse analysis frame that combines both linguistic dimension and language-related social political dimension, to scrutinize multiple 'texts' selected from several programs of Hunan TV, and try to conclude a regular pattern from analyzing its process of discourse construction from 3 perspectives as text, discourse and social practice.The paper is to unfold its analysis through the way as below:To begin with, the 'Introduction' part gives a brief view of the reason to choose such topic, recent literature review and the methodology adopted. Part one shows a quantitative analysis of selected 'Happy China' programs about their content and form, and concludes that 'Entertainization' has been the foundation of Hunan TV in essence. This part also expounds the reason why entertainment cultural would prevail through examining the social custom in local Hunan.In Part two, a textual analysis about Hunan TV entertainment programs was conducted according to narrative theories. It unveiled how did producing institute manufacture and intensify the meaning of 'happy' from its narrative structure and strategy.In Part three followed, the analysis focused exclusively on the narrative modes that Hunan TV deployed such as 'family-nation sharing the same structure', 'nationalism','media responsibility' and so on, to reunite entertainment programs back into the mainstream ideological frame as 'motherland'.Part four revealed the social practical foundation of the discourse construction of 'Happy China' through analyzing domestic political economic system as well as the cultural production new order against the background of globalization.In conclusion, the author emphasized the independence of our media under the new order of cultural production and gave positive judgment toward their effort to realize cultural self-consciousness and innovation.