How to Tell the Truth without Outraging the Press?

MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Li Xiguang

The commercialization of meclia in China has cultivated a new journalism business model characterized with scandalization, sensationalization, exaggeration, oversimplification, highly opinionated news stories, one-sidedly reporting, fabrication and hate reporting, which have clone more harm than good to the public affairs. Today the Chinese journalists are more prey to the manipu/ation of the emotions of the audiences than being a faithful messenger for the public. Une/er such a media environment, in case of news events, particularly, during crisis, it is not the media being scared by the government. but the media itself is scaring the government into silence. The Chinese news media have grown so negative and so cynica/ that it has produced growing popular clistrust of the government and the government officials. Entering a freer but fearful commercially mediated society, the Chinese government is totally tmprepared in engaging the Chinese press effectively and has lost its ability for setting public agenda and shaping public opinions. 

MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Li Xiguang

The commercialization of meclia in China has cultivated a new journalism business model characterized with scandalization, sensationalization, exaggeration, oversimplification, highly opinionated news stories, one-sidedly reporting, fabrication and hate reporting, which have clone more harm than good to the public affairs. Today the Chinese journalists are more prey to the manipu/ation of the emotions of the audiences than being a faithful messenger for the public. Une/er such a media environment, in case of news events, particularly, during crisis, it is not the media being scared by the government. but the media itself is scaring the government into silence. The Chinese news media have grown so negative and so cynica/ that it has produced growing popular clistrust of the government and the government officials. Entering a freer but fearful commercially mediated society, the Chinese government is totally tmprepared in engaging the Chinese press effectively and has lost its ability for setting public agenda and shaping public opinions. 


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuhuan Zhou ◽  
Yi Wang

BACKGROUND During the COVID-19 outbreak, social media served as the main platform for information exchange, through which the Chinese government, media and public would spread information. At the same time, a variety of emotions interweave, and the public emotions would also be affected by the government and media. OBJECTIVE This study aims to investigate the types, trends and relationships of emotional diffusion in Chinese social media among the public, the government and the media under the pandemic of COVID-19 (December 30,2019, to July 1,2020) . METHODS In this paper, Python 3.7.0 and its data crawling framework Scrapy 1.5.1 are used to write a web crawler program to search for super topics related to COVID-19 on Sina Weibo platform of different keywords . Then, we used emotional lexicon to analyze the types and trends of the public, government and media emotions on social media. Finally cross-lagged regression was applied to build the relationships of different subjects’ emotions. RESULTS The highlights of our study are threefold: (1) The public, the government and the media mainly diffuse positive emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic in China; (2) Emotional diffusion shows a certain change over time, and negative emotions are obvious in the initial phase of the pandemic, with the development of the pandemic, positive emotions surpass negative emotions and remain stable. (3)The impact among the three main emotions with the period as the time point is weak, while the impact of emotion with the day as the time point is relatively obvious. The emotions of the public and the government impact each other, and the media emotions can guide the public emotions. CONCLUSIONS This is the first study of comparing pubic, government and media emotions on the social media during COVID-19 pandemic in China. The pubic, the government and the media mainly diffuse positive emotions during the pandemic. And the government and the media have better effect on short-term emotional guidance. Therefore, when the pandemic suddenly occurs, the government and the media should intervene in time to solve problems and conflicts and diffuse positive and neutral emotions. In this regard, the government and the media can play important roles through social media in the major outbreaks. At the theoretical level, this paper takes China's epidemic environment and social media as the background to provide one of the explanatory perspectives for the spread of emotions on social media. At the some time, because of this special background, it can provide comparison and reference for the research on internet emotions in other countries.


Author(s):  
James Robert Masterson

Widespread use of social media in China is a double edged sword: social media offers opportunities for the government to connect with society, gauge the opinion of citizens in the public domain, and allow citizens to voice their anger when necessary by blowing off steam online rather than in the streets. However, social media also allows citizens to access information outside of China much more rapidly and efficiently and to link up and communicate with other citizens much more quickly. Social media allows users to share texts, photos, and files, making it much more difficult for the government to control information and to thwart organizing for political purposes. In some instances, the use of social media has forced the Chinese government to take actions that it otherwise would not have done or to reverse actions or policies already set in place. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the double-edged sword that social media poses to government officials in China, particularly high-level party officials in Beijing.


Author(s):  
Beth Knobel

This chapter discusses the erosion of the newspaper business and presents arguments as to why the free press is important, even in the Internet age. It also details the research behind this volume, and argues that no other function of a free press is as important as its ability to monitor the work of the government. The presence of a vibrant press to monitor government is not just important on the micro level but is essential to the proper functioning of our democracy. In fact, the work of the news media is valued because it helps empower the “public sphere,” meaning a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Here, the public sphere is not just a virtual or imagined place to discuss public affairs, but it is also a mechanism to enable citizens to influence social action.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pallavi Majumdar

Across the world, media entities are subjected to regulations following the universal perception that media content and media operations radically influence political debate, social policies and economic growth. This is accompanied by the tension of how to regulate the media and how to secure a free independent media on the other. Though regulation of the media content can take on several forms ranging from direct control of the government, guidelines from the industry associations, pressure from advertisers or suggestions by the civil society groups, it is normally aimed at protecting the public from perceived harm, or with enriching their knowledge or appreciation of culture. In India, the state has zealously guarded its control over broadcast news media, however, the emergence of new stakeholders in the postliberalization era has resulted in a complex mesh of regulatory controls. This paper traces the historical context of the broadcast regulatory framework in India and explores the various sites of contestations between the various stakeholders, particularly the state and the broadcasters, with specific reference to news on television.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1and2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr. G. K. Sahu ◽  
Shah Alam

We are living in a mediated world where every aspect of human life is getting affected by images of media. Consciously or unconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly our attitudes, values and belief systems are getting increasingly influenced by media. Some media critics expressed serious concern over the influence of the media in our everyday life. In the contemporary media saturated world, the agenda of the media becoming the public agenda. It is in this context, the news media play an important role in shaping public opinion and creating consciousness on different issues. Keeping in view of the importance of the news media in the contemporary society, the paper makes an attempt to ascertain the agenda setting role of the press towards women’s issues. For the purpose two mainstream dailies- one from the English and the other from the Urdu language newspapers purposively taken and their contents related to women’s issues have been subjected to detailed analysis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 230 ◽  
pp. 371-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin He ◽  
Fen Lin

AbstractFollowing a well-established research tradition on court decisions, this study analyses 524 defamation cases in China from 1993 to 2013, explores the media's success possibilities, and investigates the role of party capacity, political influence and the medium effect. Contrary to the existing assertions, we find that the media are not necessarily losing. On average, from 1993 to 2013, the success rate of news media in Chinese defamation courts was 42 per cent, and this rate has been increasing since 2005. We also find that government officials and Party organs had consistent advantages in court, while ordinary plaintiffs, magazines and websites had less success. The medium of the media (i.e. print, broadcast, internet) makes a difference, as do the government policies governing the media. In addition, local protectionism exists, but it is less rampant than expected. These findings compel us to rethink the dynamics among the media, the courts and the state, and their implications on China's institutional resilience.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 466-487
Author(s):  
Ester Saiz de Lobado García ◽  
Almudena Revilla Guijarro

AbstractThe XXth century gateway cities in Europe, such as Madrid, have followed and in-depth population readjustment, due to the arrival of immigrants from all over the world. This readjustment has left traces in the public spaces of the city; and the media have noted this phenomenon as well.This paper aims at analysing the superdiversity present in Lavapiés, through two different and complementary methodologies: the analyses of the Linguistic Landscape and of press corpora. The analysis of the landscape of the territory will be conducted through a corpus of images or Linguistic Cartography that includes samples of multilingualism present in the area. The press corpora contain news stories, interviews and articles on immigration. These analyses will provide a better picture of the area, in terms of diversity. This paper is part of the Post-conference Special Issue on Language and Migration.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Leka

The picture of recent legal developments concerning defamation in Albania is mixed. On the one hand, several criminal defamation and insult statuteshave been abolishedsince 2012, following strong lobbying of human rights organizations. On the other, the application of criminal defamation laws has not stopped, while government officials and other high profile persons have discovered the power of civil defamation claims. Faced with intense criticism, the government has tried to re-introduce the abolished criminal defamation laws and has faced the same strong opposition and international outcry. In the meantime, defamation claims or threats thereof are routinely being used against the media or against the political opponent for the only purposes of creating tension and diffusing the attention of the public. The vagueness of the laws and the inconsistencies of judicial interpretation, helped in no little measure by judicial corruption and the political control of the judiciary, have widened the gap between constitutional and international guarantees of the freedom of speech and the actual enforcement of those guarantees. This article will briefly expose the history of defamation laws in Albania, the difficulties of their application, and the status of affairs concerning defamation laws and claims.


2007 ◽  
Vol 192 ◽  
pp. 949-970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ma Ngok

AbstractTen years after the handover, Hong Kong's media faced multiple pressures. There were few cases of outright prosecution of the media, but there were subtle political and economic pressures. Co-optation of media bosses, fear of losing advertising revenue and media takeovers by pro-Beijing figures brought some of the media into line. This brought editorial shift and self-censorship, as the media systematically shied away from stories that might antagonize Beijing, underplayed negative news for the government and gave the democrats less favourable coverage. Interviews with journalists showed little evidence of ostensible intervention from government officials or media bosses, but newsroom socialization and editorial gatekeeping are effective constraints. The constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press and the moral force of professional ethics lent the media the room to defend and negotiate their freedom, but the pervasive fear induced by the political environment invariably overpowered the resistance and constrained press freedom in Hong Kong.


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