A Comparative Study Of Natural Disasters News Coverage On Paper Media Of China And The U.S.

Since the beginning of human history, human society has been suffered from natural disasters. Evenin modern society with technology fast growing every day, humans can still avoid suffers from those disasters. They pose a serious threat onpeople’s property and social stability. Several major natural disasters have happened worldwide ever since the 21st Century and thus made the disaster-related news reportingbecome more and more important. On the other hand, in competition with the Internet and other new medias, commentary as one of the three modern news writing styles, is an indispensable part of newspaper, the core competitiveness and the soul.News about natural disasters has been an important aspect of news reporting.It reflects the contradiction between human beings and the Mother Nature, abnormal phenomena of nature, damages to human society, and humanistic concern in the process of disaster relief, etc.How to report the natural disasters has been a hot but difficult topic among journalists. However, it is not only a reflection of their professionalism, but also playsan important role in shaping a good image of the government when natural disaster happens.People’s Daily and New York Times are the most authoritative and influential newspaper in China and the USA respectively. They both are mainstream newspapers. The major disaster reports represent the main opinion in their respective countries, they reported on their occurrence of natural disasters is not the same. China and the United States as the world’s two important powers, both in response to the global environmental problems have different contributions, and show different characteristics in their respective areas of environmental news. This paper focus in recent years occurred in the Chinese American respectively, and third countries three major natural disasters, taking People’s Daily and New York Times as the sampling media.This paper outlines the research background and significance of natural disasters, based on combing the existing research and related concepts, defines the concept of disaster news, the use of text analysis and comparative analysis of the two newspapers reported method were compared and analyzed, the main analysis of the main differences between sources, news genre, language and themes, summarizes the characteristics of American news media reported the disaster. And analyzes the reasons of Sino US media reports of disasters differences, both the cultural tradition of the ingrained, also because of communication theory, the world outlook, also different ideology is the main reasons of the difference. Finally, on the Chinese media how to improve disaster reports, learn to draw some enlightenment and reflection American media.