Who Will Be Responsible? Online News Framing Of School Bullying In China

Premier Li Keqiang once pointed out that the campus should be the sunniest and safest place.However,in recent years,frequent school bullying incidents have shocked the whole society.With the network media platform,the campus seems to be a source of nightmare for some students.The problem of bullying deserves the attention of the society and the country.This is closely related to the healthy growth of young people and the future of the next generation.For school bullying,how to treat it,how to solve it,and who is responsible for it,these kinds of problems are worth pondering.This article takes campus bullying as the main topic and selects three different kinds of online media: Xinhuanet,Fenghuang.com,and ThePaper.It mainly analyzes how Chinese online media responds and reports the question of who is responsible for causing and solving the school-bullying problem.This paper is based on the theory of responsibility attribution framework(combined with framing theory and attribution theory),and combines content analysis and text analysis to conduct a comprehensive research on the online reports.The results showed that Chinese online media presented a responsibility attribution framework which the social-level factors were both highlighted when mentioning causes and social solutions.Among the potential causes examined,teachers and schools were discussed most in the online reports as being responsible.When talking about how to solve the problem,schools and teachers were also mentioned most in the media,while bullies and their families,the most related causes were mentioned less often in the reports.At the same time,the study also showed that Xinhuanet mainly focused on the causes and results of social-level factors,while Phoenix.com presents a “balanced” responsibility attribution framework in terms of causes and solutions.And ThePaper focused mainly on the individual-level when mentioning the causes and embodied social-level factors for social solutions.The result suggested that the differences of the level of responsibility attribution highlighted in the reports might be affected by cultural background and political/business orientation.