A Framing Analysis Of The Coverage Of Disastrous Events In Weibo Media

Disastrous events menace people’s lives and properties, it has very important influence to social stability and economic development. For these disastrous events, measures taken by the government, the affected persons, investigations are focus of attention. Especially at this stage, new media has been rapid development, so that the disastrous events are very easy to spread quickly and cause a wider range of effects. As a further extension of the traditional media in the field of new media, Weibo media assumes the functions of releasing news, guiding public opinions and supervising the follow-up work in the disastrous events reports. Based on these circumstances, it is very important to study how to set up the framing of the Weibo media in the disastrous event reports.In June 1, 2015, the sinking of Eastern Star in Yangtze River was a serious accident. It exposes that people are lack of awareness of the dangers of such accident, so it has representative of the research. Taking the sinking of Eastern Star as the research object, the article analyzes the reports of @CCTV News, @The Beijing news and @Headline News by using content analysis and comparative analysis, and discusses the relevance and difference of the framing. And try to summarize the advantages and characteristics in the disastrous event reports between Weibo media and traditional media, reflect the shortcomings of the reports, and give some personal views. This article has four chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. It illustrates the origin of the study, recalls the related literatures, puts forward the theoretical basis of this study—frame theory, makes clear the research questions and innovation points, and proposes content analysis and comparative analysis in the research.The second chapter analyzes the framing of the Weibo media on the sinking of Eastern Star. After the sample selection and construction category, the article uses content analysis to analyze the reports from 7 categories including the reported number, the theme, the form, the object, the source, the position and picture of @CCTV News, @The Beijing news and @ Headline News on the sinking of Eastern Star.The third chapter summarizes the relevance and difference of the framing of the sinking of Eastern Star in three Weibo media. In the relevance, the three Weibo media disseminate real-time news, pay attention to official disaster relief, report the news using a variety of forms, and report the object mostly in "relevant person". In the difference, @CCTV News constructs the framing of the development of "government image" as the leading. @The Beijing news presents the framing of the query of "exploring problems" as the leading. @ Headline News shows the framing of the public opinion of "accountability " as the leading. And the article analyzes the impact factors of the framing from governmental supervision, parent media and Weibo media own characteristics.The fourth chapter makes reflection on the research. It points that there is still a lack of theme about pre-disaster warning and post disaster supervision, diversified forms of reporting need to be further strengthened, the object mostly in victims of the disaster is weakened, source of news channels and deep processing of information is limited, the overall balance of the reported position is insufficient and do not attach importance to the use of pictures. The article hopes to improve these deficiencies in order to further enhance the overall level of the coverage of disastrous events in Weibo Media.