Splitting And Unifying: "Official" And "Folk" In Media Discourse

In the evening of23July,2011, two bullet trains rear-ended in Wenzhou, which caused39people’s death and hundreds of people injured. The accident caused wide public concern over our country when it happened, official, media and civil gave respective responses to this event. By reviewing the development of the event, we can found that there was a new trend which was different with the past in the reports reported by the mass media especially the market-oriented media which were related to the accident. In the past,"Guan Fang " was always in the dominated status in the process of public events. But the new trend showed that in "Wenzhou Bullet Train Accident ","Guan Fang "was challenged by "Min Jian". This two different groups we Chinese always call "Guan Fang " and "Min Jian" took action and played a different role during the process of this event. Their action and function were not only objectively presented by the media, but also constructed by media discourse, and such construct effect of media discourse also shows media’s unscramble of "Guan Fang" and "Min Jian" and the understanding of state-society relationships of current China.Under the case of "Wenzhou Bullet Train Accident", this paper chose the reports about this event from the market-oriented newspapers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wenzhou, and attempted to describe and interpret what are the "Guan Fang" and "Min Jian" constructed by popular media discourse by studying the reports related to the rear-ended accident. Meanwhile, this paper also attempted to discuss the space of media discourse in the mainland of China by analyzing the different identities of "Guan Fang" and "Min Jian " in different types of media discourse and different public affairs.Through the analysis related to the construct effect of media discourse, this paper attempted to understand how the media understand the state-society relationships in current China and the new possibilities of media development.