| Habermas’ Public Sphere theory is the dominant paradigm of the study of mass media representing public opinion.However,in the present discussion,public opinion is mainly replaced by sources of the stories,and the critiques focus on the political stance and commercial interests of the media and its dissimilation to public sphere.Taking the readers’ letters to the four mainstream newspapers in Taiwan during the Sunflower Movement as the research object,this article employs media frame analysis and Communicative Rationality to explain the relationship between the media and the public sphere,and examine the performance of the mass media during the movement from the dimensions of pluralism and interaction.This study explores the media frames of 710 reader’s letters to China Times,The Liberty Times,United Daily News and Apple Daily in the period 19th Mar.2014 to 12th Apr.2014.It turns out that a strong emphasis on the frame of "spectators dominance","presenting conflict" and "emotional interaction" in the whole movement.To concrete,readers’ letters to the four newspapers are mainly written by a single role of social movement as spectators,of which specialists and scholars is the dominant part,and shows no significant change at different stages of the social movement,thus ignoring the representation of the dealers(government)and the actors(students),besides in the limit interaction space,there presents collusive behavior between spectators and dealers.As to the issues discussed,the newspapers focus on three issues,which is the movement process,the government’s behavior during the movement,and Taiwan’s democracy behind the movement,which ignores those deeper topics such as CSSTA and the youth generation in Taiwan and emphases the conflicts and contradictions happened in the movement in the content.In terms of the attitudes,despite the four newspapers having their own position,the attitude of supporting the movement is the majority.Finally,in the respect of representing feeling structure,in addition to the China Times’preference for emotional expression,the other newspapers show equal proportion of cognitive and emotional expression which counts over half proportion of all letters.And in the emotional expression,negative emotion,mostly tough-anger,suppresses other emotions.Moreover,the absence of pluralism squeezes and twists the quality of the participants’ dialogue and interaction in this public space.In general,the lack of pluralism of roles,issues,attitudes and emotions presented in all four mainstream newspapers squeeze and narrow the public sphere which supposes to provide different subjects a platform to interaction rationally so that leads the incomprehension among the young generation,the government and the general public even after a long time of the sunflower movement. |
