| With the background of increasing conflicts between doctors and patients in today’s China, medical profession and medical doctors have become a hot topic in news coverage. Understanding how doctors are portrayed in the media can help understand the real situation of doctor-patient relationships in China. At present, researches targeting at the image of doctors are comparatively rare, let alone researches focusing on the image of doctors on Internet media. A study in this respect can enrich existing literature on media’s presentation of doctors.This study sets to explore the image of medical doctors in online news. It uses a total of1,056news items on the news channel of Sina.com dated from January1,2013to November30,2014as study samples, and explains the image of medical doctors constructed and represented in the SINA news stories in light of the framing theory. The first step is to identify the forms of news, news sources and media positions conveyed by the news reports, so as to provide a comprehensive picture of how the media frame the image of medical doctors. In the second step, the study identifies13frames used in the SINA news reports, and describes and discusses in details the four major frames, as well as the frames that construct the’good’ doctors and’bad’ doctors.This thesis finds that, the image of medical doctors constructed and represented in SENA news stories in2013and2014tends to be positive, as39percent of the related news reports have positive images while25.8percent have negative images, and35.2percent of the news reports related with medical doctors are neutral. That is to say, the image of medical doctors in SINA news tends to be positive. Also, in SINA news construction and representation, medical doctors are, to some extent, disadvantaged and vulnerable. Also, there is stereotype in the construction and representation of the image of doctors as in the case of portrayal of’good’ doctors and’ bad’ doctors. |
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