| China has created a miracle of economic development since the reform and opening up. Although improving people’s material life, economic development has brought much anxiety to people in society, but not increasing happiness and a sense of security. The development of economy alone doesn’t bring about consistent increase of human’s happiness and inner peace. Instead, the population is echoed with the voice of doubt. Since the rapid development in social transformation period exceeds people’s expectation, they tend to express unusual detest when talking about rural-urban development divide, economic inequality, official corruption and social injustice. While our citizens enjoy fast information transmission, convenient communication and free speech, they are troubled by pervasive rumors, extreme remarks, disordered expression and invasion of privacy at the same time. As a result, suicides and mental illness cases gradually increase. What’s more, social anxiety causes negative effects for the harmonious development of China’s society that cannot be ignored: it amplifies social members’ non-identification towards the society, thus decreases social cooperation degree, and gives rise to unorganized activities and collective emergency events, all detrimental to our society. In a society where vitality and vigor should have prevailed, occur many contradictive phenomena. Individuals become indifferent to anything around them, their instinctive friendliness disappear and they find it hard to get along with each other, which all have serious negative effect on the harmonious development of our society. Therefore, public and social demand for mind soothing gradually emerges. Authorities sets up laws to guarantee the construction of mental health and public psychological prevention, some companies relieving stress like those offer the service of being the target of customers’ scolding and psychiatrists increasingly become a popular profession, because mind soothing is not only about life quality but also about our very existence.Psychosocial problems have caught the attention of party committees and the government. Psychological intervention and other work are needed to change people’s mentality, among which the news media should play an important role. Informations daily provided by the media has become the source of anxiety, so it directly affects people’s mental state whether the news reports could function as mental conciliation to people. Further more, personal abuse and injury of news reports to couldlead to greater psychological and social problems. These determine that news reports should take on more responsibilities in mind-soothing function level.This thesis then points out the four mind-soothing functions of news reports for the emerging stress and anxiety, information anxiety, emergency event anxiety, life belief anxiety and other issues through case study of news reports: 1. News reports as a social pressure reducing valve could help the public vent their negative feelings and express their positive emotion. 2. News reports have easing function by interacting with other departments, communicating the situation, clearing people’s cognitive uncertainty and decreasing social distrust. 3. News reports could provide affected individuals with public opinion and emotional support to minimize the damage done to them. 4. News reports could alleviate people’s anxiety by publicizing new ideas and behaviors. Morever, based on a large amount of news reports, the existing problems in the news reports of our country in term of some improper exercises of the mind-soothing function including secondary damage to the affected because of the indifference of outsiders, the mental stress caused by infringement of privacy, vicious incidents due to belated information publicity, over-sentimental news reports resulting from abuse of mind-soothing function, distorted news reports engaged with irrational emotional infusion, biased news reports caused by motional tendency and the resonance effect issue from cluster concern.To solve those issues, the ethical norms about the mind-soothing function of news reports in social transition period according to the caring ethics theory of Noddings, which is more rich and close to people’s daily lives. The leading ethics in the caring ethics theory is recognized as the best guidance for news reporters to express their compassion, benevolence, caring, dedication and other feelings in the reports, as well as the effective leading strategy for building a harmonious community. According to the caring ethics theory, this thesis points out that news reporters should provide news services according to human nature, make decision about news reports according to the specific social situation, approach difficult problems in reports with sympathy, and handle the improvement of report strategies involved with ethical conflicts as a whole in order to better perform their function of mind-soothing. |
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