| Content and values in the press releases of the New China News Agency were examined to determine the influence of time and culture on the construction of news. Samples were randomly selected from press releases issued during the period 1950 to 1989. Content analysis was employed to measure each news item issued on the sampled days in the categories of timeliness, currency of the news, foreign/domestic news, political correctness, Party-orientation, dominant country in the news, positive/negative news, topic, and dominant actor. In addition, news items were evaluated to determine if 23 values from Traditional Chinese, Marxist-Leninist, Development and Western news perspectives were included in the item. The results indicated that time and culture considerations were indeed important to a meaningful understanding of the construction of news in context. Time revealed the dynamic nature of news construction. Cultural considerations disclosed the uniqueness of a particular system's way of relating information about the world. In addition, specifically in the evaluation of news construction in China over time a vague pattern of a dialectic synthesis of news perspectives was discovered. Therefore, both the press philosophies developed by Siebert et al. in The Four Theories of the Press and the pre-theory of news selection developed by Shoemaker and Mayfield might be better informed by the inclusion of the dimensions of time and culture. |
