News Production, Under The Perspective Of The Sociology Of Knowledge

China's economic reform has significantly produced a sea change in the social structure, appealing to lots of scholars all over the world. As for media studies, social changes are closely linked with public opinion and media discourses. In this paper, I adopt the approach of sociology of knowledge to describe and analysis the news production process and its features in China, with the case of newspaper coverage of health care reform from 2005 to 2007.Part of the essence of sociology of knowledge is that the reality, any reality, can be approached, perceived and understood from a specific point of views, which tends to be fixed according to where one may stand or sit. When news is considered as a form of knowledge, not information, it means the news can only present the world from a particular perspective. It is impossible that the news can present any slice of reality in its entirety simply because there is no way one can claim to see the whole reality unhindered by, for example, one's physical location or social location. Sociology of knowledge never argues that what one sees is the only reality, but rather what one may see is very much determined by where one finds oneself, not just physically, but psychologically and historically.What news may mean is not the same as the knowledge it may bring to the public. A news story may mean different things to different people, depending on how news is interpreted. But individual news stories are not as important as the totality of news in general. Knowledge is not information. An individual piece of news story may be informational, but does not constitute an element of knowledge. We will need to look at the totality of news--its persistent pattern, ways of looking at the reality and the perspectives it follows--to determine the form and content of news as knowledge.The essay briefly reviews the history of media studies in the view of sociology of knowledge and rethinks the relationship between social change and journalistic practice in China, including the proposition of "News as social knowledge in China" and the standards of "news as pubic knowledge" in the normative sense. Based on the content analysis and discourse analysis to several representative newspapers and magazines, this paper also argue the concrete way of the shaping of social knowledge in transitional society of China, that is, news framing, both differ from the strategic framing in public deliberation and the propaganda in party-state authoritarian. Therefore, we try to discuss the detailed features of the reporting and rethink the social process of public issue building in china's context from the perspective of civic participation and public knowledge.