| As a specialized organization for information collection and dissemination, Mass media have played a much more important role in a society which is experiencing information explosion. However, in practice,the media performance is unsatisfactory and not functioning well, the Media social responsibility is in a dilemma. As a result, this study will focus on this dilemma and analyze its essence and causes.This article includes four parts. In the first part, it introduces the connotation of media social responsibility and makes a review on the relevant literatures on this subject and summarizes advantages and shortcomings of predecessor’s research. In the second part, it describes the appearances of the dilemma and concludes the essence of it. The third part starts from the Political Economy of communication perspective and put media in the social system to analyze the social forces that may influence media performance. This part will also analyze the cause of the dilemma under the interaction of those factors. The fourth part reviews those efforts to improve media performance made by media themselves and the academic community. what’s more,this part will also explore the possibility of getting rid of the dilemma and rebuilding media social responsibility system.The study comes to some conclusions. The crisis of media social responsibility lies in the dilemma between the freedom and responsibility, the social efficiency and economic benefit of the mass media, which is reflected by freedom abuse and involuntary when social responsibility of media is involved. In the social system, mass media and those powers including politics, economy, technology and culture which will influence its behavior form a social network, when the network is in equilibrium, public interest could be achieved. Similarly, the crisis of media social responsibility is derived from imbalance of those powers. Moral self-discipline of media and institutional constraint from outside are necessary to solve the crisis. |
