Study On The Strategy Of Telling Stories Of Persons With Disabilities In China From The Perspective Of Frame Theory

With the work on disability in China making development and progress,persons with disabilities in China have thus gradually drawn more attention from the domestic mainstream media.These reports on persons with disabilities are extensively influencing the public’s cognition and understanding of the group,and have even deeper impacts on the processes of relevant public opinions formation and the policy introduction.With the unique advantages of low political sensitivity,solid public opinion foundation,and responsive results,China’s international exchanges and cooperation of work on disability has been serving as a solid bridge and impressive badge in the fields of people-to-people diplomacy and human rights protection.With the increasing and deepening international cooperation in the field of persons with disabilities,the publicity of this field and the relevant work progress in China has become an important channel for telling a better Chinese narrative.From the perspective of comparative journalism,this study adopts the content analysis method and takes the news reports on persons with disabilities in Peopless Daily and the New York Times in the past five years as the research object.Taking the number of reports,reporting genres,reporting themes,reporting tones,media images,news sources,high-frequency words as the analysis elements from the macro,meso,and micro dimensions,this study discusses the topic features,reporting tendencies and stances,and presentation frameworks set up by the two newspapers in their reports on people with disabilities.By collating the main reasons for the differences between the two media’s reports,this study aims to put forward strategies and suggestions for the Chinese media to optimize their reports on persons with disabilities,so as to further improve the Chinese media’s reporting capabilities in this area.The study has found that,in the past five years,People’s Daily made more reports on persons with disabilities than The New York Times did;both the two newspapers adopted news and communications as the report genres for the topics on persons with disabilities;Reports in People’s Daily focused more on displaying achievements of works on disability in China,and relevant activities held by Chinese government,while The New York Times emphasized on issue disclosure and person reporting;most of People’s Daily reports were in positive positions,while in the New York Times,reports of three type of tones took up nearly similar proportions;In People’s Daily,the images of the persons with disabilities were mostly "beneficiaries of social welfare" and "self-made strugglers",while the persons in the New York Times were mostly "rights-violated victims" and "beneficiaries of social welfare";government agencies were the major news source of the People’s Daily,and the New York Times collected most information of from the persons with disabilities,and attempted to balance the news sources ratio;through the statistics of high-frequency words,we could find that the People’s Daily covered government actions and social assistance to the persons with disabilities,while the New York Times was more inclined to report from the perspective of the persons with disabilities group itself,and the latter made more reports on social phenomena and social issues related to people with disabilities.The major reasons for the differences in the coverage of persons with disabilities between the two newspapers lie in the different political institutions,media systems and social cultures between China and the United States,especially the differences in the public’s social perception of persons with disabilities.This study endorses the great significance to correctly perceive the similarities and differences in the mainstream media coverage of persons with disabilities in the two countries,and to carry out learning and communications in improving the reporting of Chinese media’s coverage on persons with disabilities.In the future,it is advisable that Chinese media further enhance the connotation of reports on persons with disabilities,make more efforts to report with both professionalism and humanistic care,balance news reporting framework,strengthen agenda setting,and make more effort to enrich and embellish the reporting topics and media images of persons with disabilities.