Comparison Of Chinese And Western Mainstream Media, International Disaster News

When human entered the 21^st century with beautiful dreams, calamities, like thunderous storm, came together with the new era, and hammered people's dreams. At the very beginning of the new century, "SARS" tortured human for nearly half a year; at the beginning of 2004, China's such provinces as Shanxi, Henan had seen a series of super mine tragedies; at the end of 2004, the India Ocean Tsunami, the century calamity, killed about 300 thousand innocent people. Bloody tragedies warned people to pay more attention to calamities in life. It also became urgent and necessary for people to pay great attention to disaster reporting.When society is facing crisis, and human facing challenges, medium must shoulder responsibilities to inspect environment, broadcast messages and lead the public opinions. However, the main stream medium of China and western countries differ from each other in these aspects.Practice of recent years showed that China's medium had made great progress in disaster reporting. In details, their speed to respond has been gradually improved; audience's right to know has been given more and more attention; they grasped more and more ways to report and their means to report has become more and more advanced. However, "Positive Propaganda in Dominant Position", as China's propagandizing policy formed in 1989, is still working. As far as today, it is an obvious fact that China's medium is still sensitive and cautious about disaster reporting. On the contrast, medium of western countries love disasters and would like to report them, which could be testified by the Pulitzer Prize. For example, in 2006, many medium had gained the 90^th Pulitzer Prize because of their reports about Katrina, the hurricane attacking Mexico gulf of America last year.Affected by such factors as politics, economy and culture, Chinese and western medium behave differently toward the same disaster, and they also differ form themselves, facing different disasters. Behavior of one country's medium toward a disaster shows their strength, characteristics, orientation etc. Behind their behaviors, lie various complex reasons. This paper focuses on case study, and takes Chinese and American medium reports about India Ocean Tsunami as the example. In this paper, I applied the Frame Theory, and did some quantitative research and qualitative research. This paper is aiming to find out differences and similarities between Chinese and western reports on international disasters, and search for hidden reasons. I sincerely hope that this paper could contribute something to Chinese academic research on domestic medium's reports on international disasters, as well, provide some constructive suggestion to Chinese medium on international disaster reporting.The first chapter of this paper provides concept related with disaster, and briefly introduces methods and theory applied in this paper. The second chapter focuses on case study, illustrates differences and similarities between Chinese and American's reporting on India Ocean Tsunami and provides analysis and summary on Chinese and American medium's features on international disaster reporting. The third chapter gives reasons behind differences and similarities between Chinese and western medium's international disaster reporting. The last chapter is my suggestion for Chinese medium on how to improve their international disaster reporting.