A Comparative Study Between The People ’s Daily And The New York Times On The Coverage Of The Missing Airliner MH370

The Missing of Malaysia Airliner MH370 is one of the international disaster incident attracting the maximum intensity of focusing of mediums home and abroad.While the Anglo-American tradition media successfully grabbed eyes all over the world and consolidated its strong position in the global voice with their successful reports, most of the Chinese media took a weak position on this reports which raised the suspicion of their professional and ability from the public. The gap between Chinese and Western media once again highlighted.The People’s Daily and the New York Times had paid considerable attention to this event with 3 months of continuous follow-up reports and provided a variety of genres, multiple news theme. However, the characteristics and differences between the above two newspapers are very clear: the people’s Daily reported on the official authoritative source, focused on neutral but positive bias reports, strengthened their own countries’ image and adopted ways of avoiding the individual coverage with families involved. The New York Times provided more exclusive insider with the international angle, focused on neutral but negative bias reports, harmed other countries’ image and adopted ways of the individual coverage by pictures mixing with text reports with families involved. These differences are caused by a variety of reasons, including the differences in property of media, media resources, the cultural backgrounds,the interests of the state and so on.The international disaster coverage is significant, not only in relation to the development of the newspaper itself, but also relating to the construction of global voice. The People’s Daily and other domestic mainstream newspapers must attach greater importance to international disaster reports, make full use of the successful experience of western international disaster reporting, and improve the reports of international disasters. To improve the contents, the newspapers should pay more attention to the demands of the audience, establish a global vision, as well as increasethe number of Exclusive in-depth reports. But in the interview process they should focus on human care,take care of the psychological feelings of the victims’ families,avoid bloody scene description. In order to respond quickly in the event of a disaster,the domestic mainstream media must establish international disaster reporting emergency mechanisms, give full consideration to difficulties that may be encountered in the international disaster reporting and resolved them. At the same time, the domestic mainstream media also need to enhance their soft power, to cultivate the special professional ability of reporters and enhance their ability to obtain and analyze intelligence, through the strengthening of cooperation and constantly optimize the reporting process; In addition, in order to meet the change of the audience’s reading habits, the domestic media should carry out comprehensive full media coverage of the disaster reports, make full use of the advantages of different types of news media to provide different kinds of news.