The Presentation Of Media Of Drug Issue

The drug problem has always been a serious social problem. According to China Drug Control Report of 2014, until the end of 2013, the registered drug addicts’ number had reached 2.475 million, with year-on-year growth of 18%, and all kinds of crimes and social security problems caused by drug abuse are gradually increasing. From April to December 2014,11 celebrities were arrested because of drug abuse, drug problem once again become a social hot spot. American sociologist Douglas suggest that the reason why people hold a negative attitude against drugs is because people who have not used drugs exaggerate its dangerous consequences; and many features of drug users come from the’illegality’ of drugs, instead of drug itself. In the current social environment, the major way we learn about drugs is from mass media. Besides, our attitude towards drugs is closely related to the news report.This paper is to study how the media presents drug use and drug addicts, especially the image of addicts. It is based on theory perspective of sociology of deviance label school. Becker, representative of the deviant theorists, suggest that it does not exist a stable and consistent social standard. They take the deviance as a social definition for some people or group used to describe the behavior of other people and groups. The media is an important way to show this social definition. The frame, words and expressions that the media use reflect the opinion of social mainstream. Based on the above perspective, this paper studies core issues as follows: through what way the media define the drug problem, what is the final definition and what kind of values such a definition reflects.The first part is to study the whole situation of the drug report. Select People’s Daily and Southern Metropolis Daily as the sample to study the news number, theme and distribution between 2008--2014. After cluster sampling,1469 samples are obtained. These reports can be classified into six themes through content analysis, among which ’drug control’ appears most frequently. The paper defines news report as a social process and focus on the reports of drug use and the image of addicts. Because the nature of drug use and the identity of drug users are diverse, the purpose of this study is to observe which part is amplified or ignored by media. This study gets 636 reports about drug use. After analysis and integration of defined phenomenon, causality, author, suggestion and scheme, moral evaluation, they are classified into three frames according to Van Gorp’s concept of frame package. One of the highest frequency frameworks is’social problem’. This study also gets 220 reports about drug users, and there are five different ways to describe drug users, among which the most frequency framework is ’violent crime’.The paper has carried on the case study as well. It selects the influential case of ’Ke Zhendong, Fang Zuming drug use’ in 2014 as example to study celebrity drug events reported by the press This paper select Southern Metropolis Daily, Beijing News, Beijing Times, Yangtze Evening Post, Chutian Metropolis Daily as the sample media, and obtained 78 samples, and analyze these samples from four aspects:the subject of report, the time distribution, the source of information and the attitude of the report. This paper agrees that the reports of the celebrity drug abuse events are relatively objective and fair, without obvious entertainment tendency. But the media put more of their attention on the progress of events than explanation of drug abuse. They ignored the essence of the drug abuse behavior explanation. Besides, this paper also researches’Ke Zhendong Fang Zuming drug use’ case on Weibo to find communication behavior of media Weibo in celebrity drug use from three aspects: blog theme、blog heat and audience comments. This paper argues that Weibo users’ attention on celebrity drug events is out of the same concerns with media reports. They are most keen to discuss topics like how to treat drug use celebrity. The most overlooked theme is the discussion of drug use behavior and drug problems.