Sino-japanese Disaster Reports A Comparative Study

Disaster, has entangled with human being's daily life for centuries, also an inevitable issue for the news reporting. Media plays the role of observation, framing the image of disaster and convey to public, while the media itself is also framing by the media environment at the same time. This essay established a time-space measuring standard to compare the disaster reporting of China and Japan through picking up an earthquake in each country and collected articles of Southern Metropolitan Newspaper in China and Asahi Shinbum in Japan for one month after the earthquake, the reporting quantity, theme change by the issue attention cycle are studied by the time dimension, and source of the news and main actor of news are statistically analyzed by the space dimension, also the style and tones were carefully compared. The conclusions after comparison are:there exists similarity in inclining to report by the character of the issue attention cycle; there exists similarity in command view of reporting. There are differences between the phase's variation of the two countries' reporting focus and news style and tones. The similarity lie in the significant political tendency in both countries as they inclined to choose the official source, while the difference lie in the choose of themes, the frame difference in different reporting stage as well as the tone of the reporting. The influence shed by different political and social system, cultural, and journalism ideology makes it inevitable for the difference in these two countries.