News Media Roles And Government Responses In Public Crisis Management

Deepened along with the reform and openness, accompanied by the rapid development of the socialist market economy, China has stepped into a crucial stage of per unit GDP $1000 to $3000. During this special period, the blowout of a lot of social issues on environment, resources, ethical equality, and public health etc, will be the bottleneck of the further social development. In 2003, the outbreak of SARS was commonly recognized as the signal of opening the topic of the public crisis management. Followed by the algae bloom of Lake Tai, the'3.14'Tibet incident and'Wenchuan'disastrous earthquake, all these public risk incidents brought out a practical problem on how to solve the public crisis effectively.Meanwhile, in contemporary consulting era, news media has more and more affected production relations and superstructure, affected people's mode of production and life style, through carrying and broadcasting a mass of information. It's no longer the traditional simple mouthpiece of government, but playing a different role in public crisis management. It affects or even decides the direction of public crisis progress, and becomes one of the principle powers of public crisis management.This article elaborates the basic definition of crisis management and public crisis. Based on these, it analyzes multi-subjects in the public crisis management, treats of the roles, conditions and causes the media playing in the public crisis management, dissects the government as the main power in public crisis management how to understand the role of media properly and how to make it play a proactive role, and introduces the news report made by US, Japan news media for public crisis incidents and the Bush Administration's responses and experiences against'9.11'incident so as to let our government and news media borrow some ideas from these valuable samples and be enlightened to manage the public crisis more effectively.