Studies On The Cover Construction Of TIME (2000-2009)

The content of media is not purely a mirror of the real world, but a chosen reappearance of the real social environment. A variety of factors contribute to the choice, including the influence of the social environment as well as the restriction of the media environment where media exist.This paper discusses the relationship between media content and social changes media environment and media location in western social environment by analyzing the 533 cover stories of Time from the year 2000 to 2009 with the method which combined quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis. Through the analysis of women cover stories on Time we can find that the number of the stories is increasing, but the coverage area has been limited and discrimination still exits on the reporting practices. The covers ahout China on Time occurs sporadically in the new century, after the period of pro-Chiang and anti-communist.Though the reporting techniques are also gradually being objective, misinterpretation and suspicion still exist. This is related much to the remaining Cold War mentality of the Western media. The covers ahout the war in Iraq and Afghanistan on Time have reflected the restrictions of national interests apparently. Under the war condition, especially after 911, the U.S. Media has become a mouthpiece of politics and military without exception. The negative reports of Islamic countries have been the mainstream during this period. Since the emergence of the first Person of the Year on TIME in 1928, many new features have appeared. For example, As TIME has realized that the history is no longer about a single person, more and more groups begin to appear and their ages also tend to be younger. In conclusion, the cover is influenced by the economic, political and social environment at that time and the media environment itself. And these factors restrict the choice of the cover stories and the construction of various images together.The point of the paper is concluded as follows. Firstly, it analyzed systematically all aspects of society that are described on TIME in details, helping to grasp the whole contents of TIME. Secondly, through the analysis of specific categories of the covers, we can learn more about the reasons for choices of TIME covers. Most previous studies only analyzed the specific event, which lacked summarizes. This paper analyses the TIME covers in the first decade of the new century and constructs different categories to grasp the various factors that impact TIME covers. Finally, the paper has sumed up the factors that constraint Time covers. Such as social environment, national interests and the media's own position. These multiple factors shaped the colorful contents of Time covers.