A Comparative Discursive News Values Analysis Of Chinese And Foreign Media Reports On Food And Drug Safety Incidents In China

The thesis conducts a comparative study on how Chinese media or foreign media presents food and drug safety incidents in China,which is a part of the crisis issue in terms of public security.The research corpora are comprised of three parts: 1)reports on ‘Chinese melaminetainted milk powder incident in 2008’;2)reports on ‘Toxic drug capsule incident in 2012’;3)reports on ‘Changchun Changsheng vaccine incident in 2018’.225 news articles are obtained from Chinese media and 120 from foreign media.UAM Corpus Tool and UAM Image Tool are employed to the analysis.The theoretical framework adopted is discursive news values analysis(DNVA),which is a relatively new approach to news values proposed by Bednarek and Caple.Though DNVA has been widely applied,few studies have been done to diachronically compare stories of the same kind incident from English-language newspapers in countries that are different to each other.In light of that,this study aims to analyze the differences of discursive news values constructed in Chinese and foreign media on the reports of food and drug safety incidents in China from 2008 to 2018.The study is aimed at addressing two research questions: 1)What are the same news values that have discursively foregrounded by Chinese or foreign media in reporting food and drug safety incidents in China?;2)What are the synchronic and diachronic differences of discursive news values construction between Chinese and foreign media in reporting food and drug safety incidents in China,and why?Analysis results show that both media undertake a similar tendency to foreground Negativity,Eliteness and Superlativeness and use Proximity and Timeliness to indicate the place and time of related incident in reporting food and drug safety incidents in China.The predominant difference lies in Negativity and Positivity and their diachronic changes.The frequency of Negativity in Chinese media is lower than that of foreign media,and manifests a downward trend year by year.Positivity presented in foreign media is similarly lower than that of Chinese media.Secondly,Chinese media prefers the type of specialists under the classification of Eliteness and the type of victimizers under the classification of Personalization,whereas foreign media tends to select the type of officials and victims.Moreover,in terms of Impact,Chinese media tends to describe the material effects,while foreign media pays more attention to the abstract mental effects.By analyzing the news genre of food and drug safety incidents in China,this study is significant for its attention to the role of Chinese and foreign media in guiding China’s public safety crisis events and the investigation to reveal the influence of China’s food and drug production and regulatory progress towards Chinese news coverage and the dynamic attitude of Western media towards China,which is of great cross-cultural and diachronic value.