On Public Crisis Reporting In Party Newspapers And Its Functions

As domestic crisis occurs with increasing frequency, research on crisis reporting has been receiving more and more attention. By taking Party Newspapers as the research object, this dissertation analyzes the features and functions of crisis reporting in Party newspapers, the relationship between public opinion supervision and the rethinking of public crisis as well as factors that influence public crisis reporting in Party Newspapers. This dissertation consists of five chapters, with their respective content as follows: The first chapter introduces the research background and research significance of this dissertation. And it also makes a review of former researches on the same issue. The second chapter introduces briefly the theory basis of this dissertation. The third chapter is the key part. In this chapter, by taking the most representative Party newspaper - People's Daily as the research object and its reporting on Wenchuan Earthquake as examples, the author concludes that Party newspapers function in ways that it would help dissolve crisis by satisfying people's needs for information and stabilizing public mood, creating a good image for the government and unite the people to tackle with the crisis. The fourth chapter analyzes the relationship between public opinion supervision in Party newspapers and the rethinking on public crisis. It is pointed out People's Daily is obviously avoiding reporting negative news and the public opinion supervision in it is apparently insufficient. The fifth chapter analyzes a few important factors that influence the reporting of public crisis in Party newspapers. It is obvious that the Party newspapers still report according to the traditional public crisis reporting frame, such as "reporting the good news but not the bad", "disasters are not news, fighting against disasters is news" and so on. Globalization and the changes of media situation and audiences are pushing forward the reform of Party newspapers' reporting frame of public crisis.Since no systematic research has been done on public crisis reporting in Party newspapers, difficulties in the process of searching for data are many. The author tries to find out the correlations between Party newspapers and public crisis, and based on the correlations the frame of this dissertation is decided. Though flaws are unavoidable, it is still hoped that this research would offer some contribution to related research areas.