Hostile Media Effect:News Of Genetically Modified Food And Its Perceptual Deviation

Walter Lippmann believed that the modern society is becoming increasingly large and complex and at the same time due to the limitations of the scope of life and personal energy,it is difficult for people to maintain complete experiential contact with the external environment but can only understand the world through all kinds of media.Today,although GM foods have spread all over the market,it is still widely understood from the media.Because the scientific community has not yet reached a convincing conclusion on the potential risks of GM foods,and governments of different countries and regions have totally different attitudes towards GM foods.Therefore,the controversy having been caused by GM foods is endless since transgenic tomato was first approved for sale in the United States twenty years ago in 1994,So what kind of "pseudo-environment" has the media created,and is there any bias in media coverage of GM food issues? Is the audience's position consistent with that of the media? These are the question that will be studied in this article.Based on communication content and the basic principles of communication effect,this paper examines the related content of GM foods communication,that is,news coverage from the perspective of hostile media effect.At the same time,it focuses on the research on the empirical analysis of the cognition of GM foods established by the public under the influence of the media.First of all,through the method of the content analysis,this paper makes a statistical analysis of GM foods reports in the People's Daily and Tencent News in recent five years.From the sources of news,information cited,the form,the subjective,the bias,the tone and the quality of the report,and so on to depict the data and on the basis of quantitative analysis to explain in more details by using the method of text analysis.The results show that the two media are basically the same in the sources and the form of the reports,but show significant differences in the news sources,coverage topics and other items.What the preference of the reporting should be noted in particular is that the two media reports tend to favor GM foods,and the sustain degree of Tencent news is higher than that of the People's Daily.Subsequently,the questionnaire survey method was used to analyze the attitude of the interviewees on GM foods.The study found that interviewees' attitudes toward GM foods can be divided into "supporters" and "opponents",in which the number of "opponents" was far greater than the "supporters".Consider the results of the content analysis,which is not difficult to find that although news coverage tends to favor GM foods,the audience is mostly opponents.Does this indicate that media reports have the opposite effect? Or at least it hasn't achieved what the communicator intended.Finally,this study has adopted two reports from the People's Daily and Tencent news.After reading the same reports,the two reports presented different perceptions between the "supporters” and the " opponents ".By asking the interviewees to score on the scale of 11,this paper finds that the position of " opponents " is stronger than that of “supporters"(Position intensity: the "supporters" score from 1 to 5,the position intensity gradually increased;the "opponents" score from-1 to-5,the position intensity gradually increased).And the stronger the position intensity is,the stronger the hostile media effect will be.At the same time,the study also found that there is a significant correlation between the frequency of news viewing and hostile media effect,which is the higher the frequency of news viewing is,the stronger hostile media effect will be.As far as the significance of this thesis is concerned,first of all,there are significant differences between the political and cultural environment of China and the western society,for which it is innovative to verify the hostile media effect in Chinese environment.In addition,in terms of research object,this paper focuses on the hot topic of GM foods as a starting point to investigate the actual bias of GM foods reporting and audience perception of media reports.In view of the fact that there is no similar research in China at present,the topic of this paper is somehow innovative.