Suchergebnisse

Examine form and content of reporting, related social implications for public policy decision-making, and coverage of polls in two newspapers, the Straits Times, and the Lianhe Zaoboa; 1993-96, chiefly.

The purpose of this article is twofold: to examine the form and content of public opinion reporting in the Singaporean news media and to determine their social implications for public policy decision making. The article analyzes coverage of public opinion polls in the two most important newspapers in Singapore over a three-year span. The data show that public opinion surveys in Singapore are fraught with theoretical and methodological problems and that their reporting in the news media leaves much to be desired. The implication is that manufacturing consent in the news, forced consensus in opinion formation, and uncontested policy debates are likely to breed government complacency.

Against the backdrop of the world system perspective, the purpose of this article is twofold: (a) to propose a new conceptual approach identifying the determinants that may affect the structure and process of foreign and international news flow and coverage in the global setting, and (b) within this framework, to determine the content (what is covered) and form (how it is covered) of Reuters' coverage of a major world event for a better understanding of why countries become news the way they do. This study argues that all countries are not created equal to be news in international communication. For those countries in the core zone of the world system, their chances of being in the news are higher than those in the semiperipheral and peripheral strata. Nations in the other two zones will have to go through several filters before they make it to the news.

The mass media have long been a major component in the U.S. foreign policy making process. Less known is the role played by the media in the flow of policy direction. The agenda-setting literature has consistently shown that the mass media are capable of influencing the public agenda, but has left the question of who sets the media agenda largely unanswered. The purpose of this study is to examine the causal relationship between foreign policy makers and media coverage of foreign policy issues in the context of U.S.-China relations from 1950 through 1984. The study predicted that in the making of U.S. China policy, foreign policy makers affected media coverage of the issue, not vice versa. The findings show that there was a positive and significant relationship between government China policy and media coverage of the issue during the study period. Using the Fourier analysis of time series, the study further provides some evidence suggesting that the causal flow, if any, in U.S. China policy making was from the government policy to the mass media.

Although the Communist Party of China has based its economic claims to legitimacy on its ability to raise individual living standards, the state's earlier approach to encouraging some people to get rich first was rendered problematic after continual ruptures in the rural economy. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, this study seeks to unravel the interplay between the state and media in China's march toward modernization by examining coverage of rural development in People's Daily (PD). From 1997 to 2006, China's central party organ reported an enormous increase in the central officials' efforts to boost the rural income, but highlighted in a hierarchical way their responsiveness according to the logics of period, region, and the task. In its assessment of rural anomalies, the responsibility was devolved to local bureaucracies, hence shifting the blame away from the central authority. A discourse analysis showed the PD stuck to a contour of economic developmentalism that upheld information and technology as the panacea, and perpetuated the state's redistributive role as the key to social equality. As such, the overtly propagandist rhetoric has been increasingly giving way to a coherent set of framing practices that rationalize the centrality of the party-state in China.