A Study Of Media’s Influence On Policy Agenda-setting Under The Background Of Media Convergence

On the basis of the development of market-oriented economy, the gradual growth of the civil society in China and the adoption of flexible governing measures by the government, the willingness of participation from the outside is growing, so does their capability to influence the policy agenda-setting.Thanks to all the elements mentioned above, policy agenda-setting becomes a more open system.The convergence of the media and its unprecedented expansion have elicited much concern from multiple scholars. After the convergence, media not only can provide a field for the discussion of public issues, which benefits a lot to the enrollment and empowerment of the civilians to take part in, but also can extract attention from the government when covering focal events and social problems.Events like compensating methods on families who lost their single child,the adoption of universal two-child policy and the law on domestic violence had been paid great attention by the media and gave rise to wide discussion among the public before they became governmental agendas.This paper contains an introduction and five chapters, the contents are as follows. The first chapter illuminated how the tendency of media convergence rebuilt policy environment and affect the pattern of policy participation, in which the environment,the policy makers and the target groups were included.Chapter 2 analyzed the meaning andfunctions of policy agenda-setting and how media exert influence on the path and mechanism of policy agenda-setting. Chapter 3 classified and compared different classical policy agenda setting modes, then discussed the feasibility of these models in China, who had a great transformation in policy agenda-setting mode and media power since the first year of PRC.In the fourth chapter,The multi-stream agenda-setting model was chosen as analyzing tool in the function of media in question stream, political stream, policy stream and the openness of the policy window, in which we conducted a case study of“anti-domestic violence law”.In chapter 5, the limitations were discussed under the influence of media, such as the abused amusement tendency, the time-dependent feature and the integrating degree of media agenda and policy agenda can all exert influence on the result. This paper adopted both positive research and normative research,namely absorbing the domestic and foreign studies, and utilizing political science, communication science and sociology from multi-disciplines to deconstruct the policy agenda setting on one hand,and doing case-study of domestic policy agenda-setting on the other hand.In theoretical sense, the study of policy agenda analysis in China started relatively late, and mainly confined to single case study, which lacks of overall grasp of the relationship between the media and policy agenda system, which are amended and enriched in this article. In practical sense,this study of the media influence on policy agenda-setting can provide a method of harmoniously handling the advantage of media, and promote the public policy to develop in a more scientific, reasonable and fair direction. It also can helps to improve the public management and build a harmonious society in China.