The Image Of Civil Servants In Chinese Newspapers Since 1990s

Civil servants, the subject of administration, came into existence ever since the foundation of nations in ancient times, if not connoted with the same meaning prevalent nowadays, shouldering the responsibilities and functioning as modern counterparts do. History ebbs and flows, the image of civil servants varies and grows. As for China, the attitude towards civil servants has seen dramatic changes throughout the vicissitudes:thirty years ago, civil servants were exactly what they were meant to be—servants for the Party and the people; After thirty years, the public's attitude towards civil servants is complex, so it is necessary to study on the media image of civil servants.The image of civil servants weighs much in boosting social stability, improving public recognition, and furbishing the image of China worldwide in that as an intangible asset, a positive image of civil servants can reap in more trust from the populace, mending fences between the government and the mass, and promoting the harmonious development of the society among others. It is agreed that the various images of civil servants in peoples' eyes are shaped by the environment they dwell in, as well as the mass media, the latter of which has emerged as the main source with its professionalism and large scale. As such, the news to be reported, together with the means wielded to represent a media image, make a great difference to the image of civil servants perceived by the listeners, and the studies on the image of civil servants in the media gradually appeal to the academia.Based on this point, this paper spins around the topic "The Image of Civil Servants in Chinese Newspapers Since 1990s:Case Studies in People's Daily and Southern Metropolis Daily", focusing on relevant reports appeared in these two newspapers in a forty-one-year span that dated back to the transition period in the 1990s, and delving into the diachronic variances of the image of civil servants presented by the media. Also in it are tentative answers to the questions below:what are the images of civil servants that the mouthpiece of the Party and Metropolis Daily have revealed? what are the changes of the images all the way? which kind of image outnumbers the other, the positive or the negative? where do the images differ and overlap? what are the specific strategies in molding the image of civil servants?In this paper, content and discourse analysis are applied, with frame theory as the theoretical basis. The first half emphasizes statistic analysis on the genres of the reports, the subjects of the reports, the locations of the news, the layouts of the news, the pictures for the news, the sources of the news, the sources of the reports, the subjects of the news and the attitudes of the reports—an effort to display the variations, the differences and similarities of the image of civil servants the two newspapers try to deliver. Using discourse analysis to decipher the specific strategies and methods applied in shaping the image of civil servants, the other half unscrambles the different inclinations of the two newspapers conveyed by the combination of different headings, leads, rhetoric and descriptions from the angle of text—an attempt to dig into the merits and drawbacks from the perspective of the framework of news production in portraying the image of civil servants by the media, and a beneficial and visualized revelation for a better image of the civil servants as well.According to the analysis, People's Daily plays an advocacy role to create a positive image of civil servants, while Southern Metropolis Daily tilts towards supervision of public opinion and tends to unveil the downside of civil servants—a contrast out of the integral influence of the civil servants themselves, the nature of the newspapers and the society. Disproportion of the positive and negative reports, exaggeration of the details and absence of multi-angles are what that plague both two newspapers. With a summary of the existing problems, this paper provides references on unbiased and professional reporting of the newspapers, and offers optimized strategies to improve the qualities of civil servants, helping form a precise and an objective image of the media.