A Study On The Media Image Of People With Autism

Autism is a life-long complex neural biological disorders.So far,there is no way to prevent and cure in medical field.At present,children autistic disorder occupied the first position in mental disability in China.In 1988,a Hollywood actor Dustin Hoffman played with a super memory autistic genius in film Rain Man and won the Oscar winner.The film Rain man draw public attention to autism as they were rarely known.However,due to the genius of autism in the film,The public were mistakenly assume that people with autism has the extraordinary talent like in the movie Rain man and left a stereotype of autism.The currently existing autism research focuses in the field of medicine,rarely combined with health communication.Therefore,this paper is try to make the health communication as a new angle,comparing the differences between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan newspapers about autism reporting and providing a new research idea for the academic research of autism.This paper is based on newspapers,which takes Yangcheng Evening News in Chinese mainland and The United Evening News in Taiwan for example,selecting the whole of autism reports which are appeared before December 31,2015 to code,using content analysis and text analysis to review the two newspapers in reports form,news pages,reported tone,news sources,reported problems,media image,find the difference and summarizes the media image of people with autism,finally find out the problems existing in the autism news reports and put forward reasonable suggestions.This paper find that the Yangcheng Evening News and The united Evening News on autism reporting are mostly in the pure news,the most frequently cited source is people with autism and their families,medical staff,experts and scholars;In the report tone,give priority to positive coverage and less negative tone.In the reporting theme and autism media image,the media tend to choose easy packaging issues and incident report,holiday and negative events are the hot spots.Yangcheng Evening News have significant growth in the "World Autism Awareness Day ".The United Evening News prefer to have stirred up sex,emotional title to highlight the people with autism.The both pay more attention to the activities of shallow layers,and their family life and growth process remain to be strengthen,the journalist need to constantly improve the quality and pay attention to the scientific reports,promote social have right cognition of people with autism and have inclusive mentality treating them to build a good social environment.