The Construction Of Environmental Issues By Mass Media

Although the environment communication in foreign countries already well developed, it is still a new field of study in our country. However environment reports in the field of environment communication has already unfolded in our country in earlier years. The study of which is also very rich. In a strage way, some environmental issues did not enter the horizon of media, but some environmental issues became the hot topics by reporting of media. Sand storm is one of the successfully constructed environmental issues by media.Constructivism is not only a useful theory, but also a kind of effective analysis tool. This paper analyzed all the reports of sand storm on the People’s Daily from the view of the constructivism. So, the main content focused on three aspects:mode of communication, the development of the evnironmental issue, the evnironmental issue themselve.Overall, the reports of sandstorm on People’s Daily is not event-centered for so many years, but mainly adopted the "phenomenon-strategy" reports mode. Thus journalists effectively avoid explaining the complex causes of the sand storm. At the same time, the People’s Daily did not provide enough layout for the topic of sand storm in order to report in detail and depth. The mainly form of report is short news. It is a dilemma:the environmental issue needs to be deeply reported, but can not get enough layout.According to the report number and persistence in People’s Daily, the development of the sand storm issues can be divided into three stages:from1993to1999is the origin stage of the issue; from2000to2006is the strengthening stage of the issues; from2007to2011is the mature stage of the issue. At different stage, the content of the sand storm issues is different. But the general trend is the richer the later. However, the number of reports is few in the early years, maximum in the middle and steady later.After more than ten years of development, the issue of sand storm on People’s Daily has basically taken shape, including five different discourses:scientific discourse, official discourse, human centralism discourse, disaster discourse, north orientation discourse. These discourses also reflect the deviation on the understanding of sand storm. Such as in the north orientation discourse, there is no good for sand storm. These are not good for a correct understanding of the sand storm for the audience.Above all, through all these analysis come to the most important conclusion is: the media reports on the environmental issue is constructive. This means that the media can do some thing on reporting of environmental issues.