Study On Media Agenda And The Government Agenda In Food Safety Cirsis

In recent years, the public have already been quite familiar with food safetyincidents. And food safety crisis in our country is especially remarkable in2011.Chinese who cares food most in the world, have lost their belief gradually afterfacing with so many food safety problems. And all of those problems arechallenging both government credibility and professional media reports.From the perspective of communication, the relations and interactionsamong government agenda, media agenda and also public agenda are complexduring food safety crisis. The media always design their agenda thoughtfully onfood safety problems, so that they can play a significant role in governments’agendas and decisions making through influencing public agenda. Meanwhile,the government may also cope with the media and the public positively, andstrengthen the public opinion monitoring and guidance by driving agendasettings. The food safety management system is quite complicated. This thesis startsfrom the communication perspective, and bases on “crisis dissemination” and“the agenda setting” theories, using the approaches of literature research, contentanalysis, case studies and comparative analysis, and aiming at studying on bothof the characteristics of media agenda settings and the effects of governmentagenda guidance, as well as putting forward some proposals for media andgovernment in food safety crisis agenda settings in the end.This thesis consists of six parts. The first part clarifies some relatedconcepts and the crisis dissemination characteristics in new media environment.The Second part reviews “the agenda setting” theory. The third part draws aconclusion on agenda setting patterns from different media in food safety crisisreports, through the quantitative and content analysis. The fourth part studies theeffect of government agenda guidance in food safety crisis dissemination,mainly does the qualitative investigation from the case comparative analysis.The fifth part offers proposals for media and government when dealing with the agenda setting issues. The sixth part is the conclusion.