The Study Of The Media Report’s Effect On Social Trust

Just as German sociologist Simmel once has written in his voluminous book " ThePhilosophy of Money ": Trust is one of the most important and comprehensive socialforces.Without trust, the society itself will fall into disorder. Many specific case studies haveconfirmed that media reports show clearly influence on social trust.On the basis of summaringprevious studies, this paper tries to solve the following two questions:How the media reportscommunicate with the external factors of trust?And how this kind of communication affectsthe level of social trust?In recent years, China has experienced SARS, avian flu, Vaccine Emergencies and otherpublic health emergencies. In order to specify the subject of the study, this thesis choosesthree Vaccine Emergencies as case studies which include "the hepatitis A vaccine incident inAnhui Province in2005","the vaccine incident in Shanxi Province in2010" and "the hepatitisB vaccine incident in Hunan Province in2013", because media are enthusiastic about suchemergencies which can easily show how social trust works and changes.Media reports follow the way of "distrust" to "monitoring" our society, but once this kindof function goes to the extreme, the overall social trust is likely to have a negative impact.Through the comparative analysis of media reports of the three evens, I find that the mediatend to use "corruption framework" to reproduce the vaccine incident.The specific process of how media influence social trust can be perceived as how mediashape the internal factors of the trust. Media can influence social emotion through elaborationlikelihood model of persuasion so as to influence social trust.