A Study On COVID-19 Photo News Reports In People’s Daily

After the outbreak of the New Crown epidemic,unlike the collective media aphasia that existed during the SARS news coverage in 2003,People’s Daily was the first to seize the public opinion arena to report on the New Crown,especially focusing on photo news coverage to help audiences understand the New Crown epidemic visually and visibly.In sudden public health events,photo reports are more likely to reach audiences and achieve the best communication effect than text reports due to the visual advantages of their scenes,visibility and objectivity.The article uses textual analysis to analyse the news pictures of People’s Daily,and analyses the visual advantages,reporting characteristics and communication methods of news pictures in sudden public health events based on image stratification theory,visual rhetoric theory and rhetorical "trilogy",which is conducive to the media’s correct guidance of public opinion,relieving the audience’s anxiety and helping them form a scientific and rational attitude.It helps the media to guide public opinion,relieve audience anxiety,help them to form a scientific and rational awareness of epidemic protection,and guide the whole community to fight the epidemic.The study found that People’s Daily’s photo reports are multi-dimensional in theme,resonate easily with audiences at the verbal message level,objectively reproduce news scenes at the external level,and convey communicators’ opinion messages at the internal level,while the visual rhetorical techniques used are mainly metaphor and metonymy,which can both enhance the visual effect of news pictures and deepen the news value.In terms of reporting characteristics,it has a broad vision and takes into account the macro and the micro,integrating the Chinese and foreign,balancing and coordinating internally,without being condescending externally,adhering to the concept of human-centred reporting,and using the setting of master themes and the use of symbols to trigger empathy,using the audience’s "empathy" to defeat the "epidemic" of the new crown.In terms of communication methods,the story was not only rhetorically crowned and apathetically crowned to give the images a sense of ritual and deepen the collective memory,but also adjusted the topics in a timely manner according to the dynamics of public opinion,using "static" to control "dynamic",and using the form of thematic pictures to present the story in a multi-dimensional manner for positive publicity.Finally,we suggest improvements to People’s Daily’s photo coverage of the new epidemic.