A Comparative Study On The Coverage Of Issues Concerning The Spring Festival Chartered Flights In The Mainland And Taiwan Media

The fact that the direct exchanges of mail, business, air and shipping services across the Taiwan Straits have been accelerating over the past few years has made the corresponding issue remain one of the top stories in the mass media, and the Spring Festival Chartered Flights, as one of the important components of the issue, has been receiving high attention since the take-off of the first flight in 2003.It is believed that the Spring Festival Chartered Flights not only serves as the ice-breaking first non-stop flights across the straits, but also exerts great positive impact on promoting mutual understanding and communication between people on the mainland and people in Taiwan. This dissertation conducts a comparative study on the coverage concerning Spring Festival Chartered Flights in People's Daily and United Daily News, each of which ranks the most influential newspaper in its respective circulation area, by taking the coverage in the January and February of 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007and 2008 as research samples. It first makes a quantitative analysis on the objective news elements,including news layout, news source, quotation in news , information source, reporting angle, news genre and opportuneness of news story; then it analyzes the key words and reporting styles in the two newspapers by adopting discourses analysis from semeiology as the study method, as an effort to probe into the differences in the coverage of Cross-Strait Issues between the mass media in Taiwan and the mainland. In succession, it analyzes the reasons that have triggered those differences as well as the cognitive impact of those differences on people across the straits.The research finds out that the two newspapers shares similarities in some basic news elements, like coverage frequency, news source and reporting genre, but vary in their interpretations of events. They are prone to interpret the same event from their own political stands; as a result, both of their coverage is largely featured by political bias. In the meantime, they both use different key words to reinforce its political ideology and news value, which contribute to strengthening their influences on their respective readers.