A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Reports On The Malaysia Missing Flight From The Perspective Of Cultural Values

As an emergent public crisis which involves the public interests and international relationship among many countries, the Missing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with about 239 passengers (multi-nationality) in March,2014 has drawn the attention of media all over the world. The reporting of this accident can be seen as an important war of mass communication. However, our Chinese media performance was not that good in this war. Because of the emotionalism, imitation of foreign media, lack of primary information and other problems of the news discourse, Chinese media were questioned and criticized by the public.On the one hand, based on the theories of Foucault (1972), the discursive formation is to define a regularity between objects, types of statements and so on. On the other hand, Rokeach (1973) has presented that values are "a learned organization of rules". In this way, it can be pointed out that the different cultural values can be seen as the underlying reasons of the formation of different discourses, including news discourses of Chinese and foreign media. However, the news discourse needs to adapt to the national cultural values in an appropriate way. The inconsistency and overdependence between news discourse and cultural values will both affect the understanding, acceptance and judgment of the public about the news reporting of the accident.This thesis will be based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory and Inglehart-Welzel cultural map to conclude 7 dimensions of American and Chinese cultural value patterns. Take the reports of Malaysia missing flight in New York Times and China Daily (from March to May,2014) as examples to make corpus study and discourse analysis in order to classify the facts that 1) different cultural values are the underlying reasons of the different formation of news discourses.2) there are some similarities and conflicts between the cultural values behind new discourses and traditional cultural values which arise from different reasons.3) the inconsistency and overdependence between news reporting discourse and traditional cultural values are the underlying reasons of public criticism.It was found in this thesis that Chinese disaster news discourse share similar cultural value dimensions of strong family cognition, emotionalism, spirituality, collectivism and long-term orientation with traditional cultural value theory. However, Chinese disaster news discourse lays emphasis on religiosity with low power distance while American news discourse is on the contrary, which goes against the traditional cultural value theory.The result of this study can help to make some supplement to the cultural value theory and its application in the particular area of mass communication. Moreover, it can help to report the emergent public crisis in the most appropriate way which adapts to different cultural values and help the readers of different countries have the best understanding of news discourse in the most acceptable way in order to reduce their complaints and criticism in the future. In this way, the positive image and authority of Chinese government can also be built.