Newspaper Commentaries And The Construction Of Public Sphere

Nowadays, China is in a critical period of social transition; all fields areexperienceing a holistic and comprehensive transition of structure. The growth of publicspirit, the occurrence of civic consciousness, the rise of writing, the expansion of publicspace make the construction of the public sphere necessary.Based on China's contemporary social reality and the western public sphere theroy,this paper select The Southern Metropolis Daily' commentaries as the object of studywhich is the most representative benchmark in China and combine qualitative methodwith quantitative method to analyse the layout, the columns, the writers' identity, theissues'type, the topics'possessions and discourse stance of the commentary trying toprove that The Southern Metropolis Daily has already put the historic mission ofconstructing the public sphere into practice through scientific datas and texts.This paper start from the related concepts of the newspaper commentary and thepublic sphere to research the relationship between the commentary and the construction ofthe public domain. And then it analyse the external environment and internal conditionswhen commentaryies of The Southern Metropolis Daliy constructing the public sphere.Then from the forum and columns, the author, public discussion of the general topics,confrontation of diverse viewpoints and consensus of opinions, it illustrate theperformance of Sourthern Metropolis Daliy. And then by means of parsing the fittness ofpublic nature of the public sphere, political aspirations and spiritual essence of rationalcritique of the commentary of the Southern Metropolis Daliy, this paper discusses that ithas already had mature operation mechanism of the public domin. On the basis of this, thepaper illustrates the five features when the commentary consturct the public sphere.Finally, for soluting the bottleneck when constructing the public domin,this paperproposes that we should reform the media system, expand the commentary team andcombine the theroy with practice closely.