How Chinese Newspapers Covered Coal Mine Disasters In 2001-2006 Years

The coverage on Coal mine disasters is a quite typical phenomenon of "normal disaster" reporting.For one year on average,China has 6000 miners died in coal mine disasters.It is nearly 5 times than the number of Hurricane Katrina(2005) sufferers.Media in China released hundreds of thousands stories on mine disasters in the last five years.This paper selected "People's Daily","South Daily","Henan Daily","Beijing Youth Daily","Southern City Daily", and "Dahe Daily" totally 6 newspapers as its main study target.By using the methods of literature searching,quantitative content analysis,observation,and case study,this project was trying to make a whole picture of the mine disaster coverage,also to find out the stories' deficiency and how to improve disaster reportage.This paper only focuses on the mine disaster news published from July 17^th,2001 to 17^th, 2006.The content of those stories was divided into seven genres:the number and identities of sufferers,the process of how a disaster happened,journalist's action,governmental or official action,actions of mine's owners and managers,damages excluding people's dying,and historical significance.The stories were analyzed from a perspective of framing theory in communication science.On the one hand,this paper examined and analyzed what the reporting themes are and how they changed over time.On the other hand,it made a comparison between Party newspaper s' and market-dominated newspapers' mine disaster stories on themes distribution.With a content analysis by SPSS software(n=277),this paper gave emphasis to how mine disaster news framed governmental and officials' action,also to the reporting angles on miners and their families.Furthermore,it discussed the government-press relationship in recent China and the question of how to cover miners and their families in a humanism approach.In all,it reached four conclusions:Firstly,Mainland newspapers gave much emphasis to governmental actions and sufferers' number but paid little attention to damages such as coal resource waste,economic losing,and environmental pollution.The stories especially ignored the pollution problem caused by coal mine disasters.In the comparison of Party-newspapers and market-dominated newspapers,it was found that 40.9 percent of Party-newspaper stories take governmental actions as reporting theme, and most of them are positive news.By contrast,the market-dominated newspaper stories mostly emphasized the number and identities of sufferers and how the sufferers be treated.The newspapers were trying to divert readers' attention from governments to the sufferers,for differentiating themselves form Party-newspapers.Secondly,there are elements of both journalism and propaganda in mine disaster news. Party-newspaper stories have thicker color of propaganda while market-dominated newspaper stories at a higher level followed professionalism journalism standards.This judgment mainly based on the examination of reporting perspectives and the degree of being balanced.Whether a story tells readers how journalists got information was also considered.Thirdly,a special government-press relationship is implied by the reporting frame on official actions.That is "media helps government much but hurt it little" and "media intends to hurt junior governments but to help senior governments".In other words,it is more often than not to see governments are being reported positively in disaster news.Generally speaking,mine disaster news is often consistent with governmental "frame" or wish.Besides,junior governments are more likely to be covered negatively in a disaster story than senior governments. All of 115 sample stories of Party-newspaper positively covered provincial or higher governments' actions and policies.China mainland media has not formed a disaster reporting routine of timely-ness,accuracy,and independence.Fourthly,there is a problem of deceptive or disingenuous humanism reporting approach with mine disaster coverage.The paper also did an analysis on newspapers' timely-ness of reporting,it discussed whether disaster news put stigma to the names of provinces too.In the end,the paper puts forward three proposals to the government and media:journalists should gain a complete and actual press freedom;disaster reporting needs to be more professional;China's media should try to avoid profiteering in disaster reporting.