Study On Chinese Military Journalism

The year 2008 was the 30th anniversary of China's opening and reformation, while 2009 is the 60th anniversary of the foundation of New China. During the two periods, the Comprehensive national strength of China has been greatly promoted; the army has developed into a new stage, in the meantime, the military journalism has experienced a process from starting to perfection.The Party has issued to build an army that will follow orders, serve the people, brave and competent. During the study and practice the scientific concept of development in 2008, people's army comes in front again. In 2009, president Hu Jintao called for the army to realize the core value as a soldier, making a high requirement for the army and pointing out the direction of the development of military journalism at the same time.New time, new assignments, together with new challenges, military journalism should only enforce theoretic study, reform reports and get closer to offices and soldiers in order to serve better for the Party, for the building of Army, and for a better political guarantee of officials and soldiers.Military Journalism is a new research area, few scholars have done in this field. As a student majored in journalism and in-service soldier, I am obliged to study and research on the state, characteristics, main stream media, shortcomings, and future development of China's military journalism, therefore to contribute to the theoretic research and development of China's military journalism.The media of China's military communication is composed of paper, broadcasting, television and internet. In the paper media, one major characteristic is that every major military area has its own newspapers, which forms a system that is led by the PLA NEWS; While the broadcasting and television media is represented by central media, such as CCTV military channel, formed by regional televisions and broadcasting agencies, and made up of news reports, narrative repots and talk shows; the internet is playing a more and more important role recently, many of the major websites have established their military channel, such as People's.com, sina.com.cn, sohu.com, Yahoo.com.cn and 163.com etc. Besides there are also some military oriented webs, so we can conclude that the news media has developed pretty fast, and in a higher quality, it provides a good flat for military journalism.The dissemination of information on China's military news content is divided into two types of reports, conventional and non-conventional ones. Most reports in our daily newspaper, radio, television and on the internet mostly belong to the former one. mainly covering military work, political work reports, reports in science and technical equipment in particular, like the serial report for China's manned space project which took several years. In recent years, the share of unconventional reports is increasing more and more and the reason can be divided into two aspects: First, with the changes in the international situation, more international and inter-regional conflicts were found over the past few years in the international community due to the worsening of contradiction. Especially after the U.S. "9.11",there has been an increase in the outbreak of serial conflicts focusing on counter-terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, resulting in the rising number of conventional reports proportion. Second, in recent years due to the occurrence of "atypical pneumonia", freezing rain and snow disaster, Wenchuan earthquake, such unexpected diseases and natural disasters, resulted in an increase in objective and non-conventional reports. As an armed force under the leadership of the Party, the People's Army has made significant and immeasurable contributions in the fight against the disasters. So as the military news media, we must vigorously publicize and promote the great spirit of the People's Army for the people .As one part of the mass media, military journalism media shares some same characteristics with the mass media, such as timeliness, authenticity, etc. However, because of military's special social status, social functions, special management system and the restraint of rules and regulations, military journalism media shows its particular media-specific features, which can be roughly divided into several terms as follows. Firstly, it owns strong political overtones.,for the military news plays an important role in political work, which owns advocacy-oriented and disseminative functions. The military press must keep up with the party's decision-making arrangements to be the mouthpiece of the party and the people's army. Secondly, the contents must be confidential. In a lot of military news, "5W1H" are incomplete or missing, which mainly due to the confidentiality of the special forces that can not be disclosed to the public. Thirdly, it is characterized by strict discipline, which primarily reflects in the approval, release processes of the military news. For the military information's great significance and wide impact, the units focus on the content and form of information. In terms of theme, opinion and language of military news, all of these have strict limits. For the military information must be strictly in accordance with the instructions of party spirit. The main readers of Military news are the party and government organs, the armed forces and ordinary people. They just consider the military news as part of social life, however, if any major events happens, the audience will pay more attention to military news.On the social functions of military news, most important functions are leading, promoting, educating and building, and these four functions are derived from the nature of military news. The effective communication of military news will do the deeds in spreading the Party's policy, leading people to concern about the national defense, enhancing the nation's confidence and in the meantime, helping to build China an image of a major country taking responsibility.Though we have a good developing trend, we do have some shortcomings in the military news, mainly in the following four aspects: timeliness, feedbacks, channels and the quality of journalists. The further reason is that the special political system and administrative policy, if we want a solution in the end, a reformation is a must. Firstly, starting from the mechanism, our country should make certain policies and the army should issue certain orders to regulate the effective communication of military news; secondly, enlarge the spreading channels to get more feedback information; thirdly, we should conduct necessary reorganizations to news media, make the best people access to our best facilities, promote the quality of our news media, so as to attract best people to devote the our military communication, to the frontline, to the baseline, to the soldiers, truly reflect the life our soldiers. Led by our Party, supported by people and offices and soldiers, I sole believe, China's military journalism will have a brighter future.