A Study On The News Bias In Reports On Major Disasters Events

As an indispensable channel of information communication of the public including victims after the occurrence of major disaster events,disaster news takes on many important functions including offering the early warning of disasters,pacifying popular feelings,giving assistance to reconstruction,even conducting an investigation on the cause of events and tracing accountability.Disaster news should correctly reflect the voices of victims,concentrate efforts on enhancing public discussions,facilitate reflection and self-criticism on the loopholes of the system and promote disaster governance and the reformation and improvement of ways of disaster prevention and relief so as to maintain public interests and avoid the repeated occurrence of similar tragedies.News constructs disaster events through discourses.In the meanwhile,discourses are affected by social structure and process.Chinese media have experienced a long historical process from being strongly controlled to being relatively open and free.However,media fail to get involved in and report disasters in a satisfactory way.This paper takes such a malignant accident as Tianjin Binhai explosion causing heavy casualties and property losses as an example,uses the research approach of critical discourse analysis,comprehensively applies research methods like discourse analysis and in-depth interviews,and points it out that Chinese media still have news bias in the aspect of reporting disaster events under the influence of factors like news management and control and news entertainment.Their performance characteristics in the aspect of discourse narration and structure mainly include making disaster events reappear in a dramatic and fragmented way and having a bias for personal deeds and focusing on authority.This news bias presents differentiation in different types of media.Compared with media with a high degree of marketization and social media represented by WeChat public accounts,a part of local media are very obvious in the aspect of news bias.The existence of news bias in disaster events will weaken the credibility of media,hinder the practical implementation of supervision by public opinions and may exert bad socialinfluence.Through referring to feasible practical examples,the author proposes the related measures of correcting news bias and calls on people to practically attach importance to and carry out the consciousness of news professionalism in news media.