从文化价值观分析中美社会新闻报道的差异—以 2013 年《中国日报》与《纽约时报》就中国环境污染的报道为例

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Research
In recent decades, China has witnessed rapid development with its internationalstatus and international influence constantly ascending and enhancing. At the sametime, the issues concerning China have attracted considerable attention from westernsociety in terms of political, economic, social aspects, etc. Nowadays, China has beenlisted on the second largest economy after America. On the international level, Chinahas become the focus of attention, and the world is eager to understand China.Meanwhile, China’s mainstream media is also trying to introduce China throughvarious channels to the global audience. Those phenomena above can be easilyobserved from the increasing amount of the media’s attention to Chinese issues inwestern countries.
On the national level, it has been widely witnessed that dramatic changes haveoccurred in China in recent decades with the acceleration of globalization and thetendency toward pluralism. On the one hand, accompanied by remarkableachievements in economy and other fields, a series of thorny issues have emerged atthe same time. For example, the economic and social developments are stillunbalanced. Furthermore, environmental issues are becoming more serious. Most ofthe problems are excessively concerned by the public. In addition, with thedevelopment of globalization, China has been placed under the spotlight in the wholeworld. While as one of the important means of China’s external communication,China Daily is an important window for the world to read about China.
On the other hand, China is depicted by the international media, especiallywestern elite media outlets. It is also important because they have a considerableimpact on the perception of the international public on Chinese society, and the imagetends to be different from that in the Chinese media. Therefore, it is academicallyrelevant and important to comparatively analyze how China is represented incross-national contexts.
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1.2 The Significance of the Research
There are several reasons for the author to choose China Daily and New YorkTimes as the research objectives:
First of all, China and the United States are the representative countries of theeast and the west. Although the development of their news media is different, theyhave similarities and differences so that the two media have a larger comparable spacein the coverage of the news reporting.
Next, China Daily is a more influential English newspaper in China and it hasbeen preferred and regarded as a more credible English-language newspaper byhigh-end people at home and abroad. New York Times is one of the mostrepresentative high-quality newspapers of the United States. Therefore, this thesistries to analyze the characteristics of social news reports in China Daily and New YorkTimes through the comparison of two representative news media as a sample. What ismore, reasons why the differences are caused are analyzed from the perspective ofcross cultural communication. At the same time, it is hoped that the Chinesejournalists will pay attention to the problems of social news reports, recognize the gapbetween China and the United States in the reporting of social news and learn thegood aspects from news values of American news reports.
To some extent, the news reports not only contain the dissemination of newsinformation. From the dissemination process of information fragments, it has replaceda certain social and cultural trends of the forward-looking and continuity. As a productof human ideology, in short, it has been the executor of cultural field.
Firstly, social news reports, as the emerging news in recent years, reflect thesocial ethics and moral relations of a country. At the same time, it embodies the socialphenomena, social atmosphere, social problems and anecdotes in nature and society.Therefore, it is closely related to its own culture. Secondly, in the content of theresearch, simply taking the news of China and the United States as the center, manyscholars employ different news media such as newspapers, television programs as aresearch object to study the characteristics of Sino-US news reports.
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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Studies Abroad
The study of Chinese and American social news reports belongs to the categoryof comparative journalism. The birth of comparative journalism dates back to 1956when the book Four Theories of the Press co-authored by three American journalistsWilbur Schramn, Theodore Peterson and Fred S. Siebert, was published. “It is worththe name the cornerstone of comparative journalism because this book gives the worlda first-ever global view of the intricacies of the press. In fact, the thinking of westerncomparative journalists still has not jumped out of the traditional case” (Zhang Dawei28).
From the twentieth century, American scholars began to study Chinesenewspapers. For example, the more famous are Patterson’s paper China’s journalism,Y. P. Wang’s paper the rise of Chinese local newspapers, paper The origin of Chinesejournalism of an American scholar and Rhett White’s monograph China’s periodicalnewspaper: 1800-1911.
Through the collection and collation of the materials, the author finds that thereare few studies on the news reports in China, especially the research on Chinese socialnews reports. However, there are abundant researches on the news reports of theirown countries, especially in the field of investigative reports.
On the one hand, American scholars are mostly concerned about the US localsocial news reports. As one of the social news reports, investigative reports have beenthe concern and attention of Western journalists. First of all, in the definition ofinvestigative reports, many well-known scholars give their own definition. Here aresome definitions as follows.
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2.2 Studies at Home
Domestic scholars mostly concentrate on comparative study of the Sino-US newsreports in the field of journalism. A Comparative Study of Sino - Japanese Journalismin the Past 100 Years written by Du Chaobin which was published in 1931 is one ofthe works of Comparative journalism. While after 1949, the study of comparativejournalism is interrupted due to the long-standing Cold War between the East and theWest. In the 1980s, there are a series of works of comparative journalism written byLi Zhan and other scholars in Taiwan. It is not until the 1990s that there are someresearches in Chin’s comparative journalism. For example, Tao Han's ComparativeJournalism published in 1994 makes a systematic introduction to western journalismtheories and Marxist journalism theories on media ownership, management, worldnews history, press law, press freedom and so on. In addition, it also makes ahorizontal comparison in several countries. Liu Xiatang’s Comparative Journalismwhich is published in 1997 takes Chinese and foreign news theories, culture andbusiness three aspects into comparison. What is more, The Comparison of the Historyof Chinese and Western News, edited by Tong Bing in 1999 compares Chinese andwestern editorial policy, the media organization structure, the social regulation of themedia, the news concept and so on. In the 21st century, the Renmin University ofChina Press publishes Comparative News Communication edited by Tong Bing in2002, which can be said that it is a summary of the previous comparison of journalismresearch. Although there are duplication in the content with the previous Chinese andWestern News Outline, it is still a relatively high level of research in China’scomparative journalism study since this book is very objective and profound withoutideological tone of the old tune.
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CHAPTER III THEORIES AND METHODOLOGY....................... 14
3.1 Hofstede’s Value Dimensions Theory................ 14
3.1.1 Inpidualism and Collectivism .........................14
3.1.2 Uncertainty Avoidance............ 15
CHAPTER IV CONTENT ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF NEWSIN CHINA DAILY AND NEW YORK TIMES ........... 21
4.1 Content Analysis in China Daily and New York Times .............. 21
4.1.1 The Number of News................ 21
4.1.2 Genre of News .................... 22
CHARTER V THE REASONS FOR DIFFERENCES OF SOCIAL NEWSREPORTING IN CHINA DAILY AND NEW YORK TIMES ............. 35
5.1 Confucian Culture vs. Christian Culture......................... 35
5.1.1 Confucian Culture and Its Reflection in News Reporting ..................... 35
5.1.2 Christian Culture and Its Reflection in News Reporting ....................... 38

CHARTER VTHE REASONS FOR DIFFERENCES OF SOCIAL NEWSREPORTING IN CHINA DAILY AND NEW YORK TIMES

5.1 Confucian Culture vs. Christian Culture
Society is a reflection of the culture of a country. The leading cultures areConfucian culture fused with Taoism and Buddhism in China and Christian culture inthe United States.
5.1.1 Confucian Culture and Its Reflection in News Reporting
First of all, taking the history as the background, China is an ancient countrywith thousands of years of brilliant civilization. The most profound and the greatestinfluence on Chinese culture is Confucianism. According to Meng Peiyuan, “thevirtual existence of Confucius and the thought Confucianism of mankind is based onemotional activity rather than abstract reasoning” (26). In addition, Confucianismbelieves that heaven, the earth and human are a harmonious unity. Therefore, peopleare not isolated in a certain relationship. In addition, all things should be considered ina global and holistic manner. In addition, the core value of Confucianism is “Ren”,which directs to the word “group”, such as group honour, group interest, harmony,uniformity and unity in society. Thus, Confucianism emphasizes more on the groupconsciousness and social consciousness. Consequently, the Chinese people generallyhold the idea that personal interest should obey the social and the group interest.Besides Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism also have profound influence on thetraditional Chinese thinking patterns.
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CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION

6.1 Major Findings and Suggestions
Air pollution is an important problem in social issues, to which the public havepaid much attention in today’s China. Besides, as a social monitor, the news mediahave the responsibility to bear the reports of social news to help the public to build aharmonious society. In addition, the differences in history and culture determine thedominant values of a person which have great influences on the news reporting.
Based on the comparative analysis in this thesis, the author realizes that hugedifferences in the social news reports of Chinese and American Media exist in airpollution. Firstly, it is concluded that the content of the news report is regular in ChinaDaily which lacks the persity in reporting angles especially reflected in in-depthreports and investigative reports just like in New York Times. Next, according to thetone of reporting, the reports of social news of China Daily tend to be positive andneutral, while the tendency in New York Times is more negative and neutral in thesame news reporting. Besides, some data reported in social news are different inChina and in America, which causes the doubts of America to the Chinese data. Inaddition, the American social reports and Chinese social news reports reveal thehumanistic caring in news media from different way. Last but not least, the Americansocial news reports involve the relevant problems to the Chinese government, whilethe social news reports in China emphasize more on the actions and determination ofthe government.
According to different characteristics above, the reasons are also analyzed in thefollowing theories in both cross-cultural communication and communication fields.
reference(omitted)