Research On Communication Between Our Government And Media In Public Crisis Management

For the 60 years since the Foundation of New China, especially since the reform and opening up 30 years ago, China has made outstanding achievements in its economic and social development. However, with the rapid development of society and economy, more and more natural and social contradictions have gradually appeared, and various public crises happened frequently. In the new century, one typical crisis name after another were branded on our memory, such as SRAS in 2003, the avian flu in 2004, the water pollution event of Songhua River in 2005, big snowstorm in south of China and the "5.12" Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, "7.5" indiscriminate violence in Xinjiang in 2009, etc. This series of public crisis not only has seriously influenced the normal life order in the society and even greatly harmed people's lives and health, but also provided a greater challenge to Government's capabilities to handle the public crisis. In response to public crisis, the Government's ability to set up an upstanding trust and communication mechanism, make full use of the advantages of media in information transmission and maintain normal communications with the media is of paramount importance for stabilizing social system which is temporarily out of order. This paper intends to explore the question: What problems encountered in the process of crisis communication between the Chinese government and the media? What are the reasons behind the problem? Finally, we discuss that what we can do to improve Government's ability to communicate with the media based on these problems as well as reasons behind them. This paper can be divided into five parts as follows:The first part is introduction, mainly talks about the background of the topic, the current studies of domestic and international scholars, as well as some relevant concepts including crisis and crisis communication.The second part illustrates the necessity and principles of the communication between the government and the media in public crisis. First, it explains the necessity of crisis communication between the government and the media from the aspects of protecting the citizen's right to obtain information, maintaining public safety and establishing the image of the government. Then, it describes some of the principles of crisis communication from the aspects of gaining public initiative rapidly and timely, establishing the credibility and authority of information communication as well as making clear the system of crisis spokesman.In the third part, firstly, a case study of the Water Pollution Event in Songhua River is presented. Based on this, the problems of the crisis communication between the government and the media and the causes behind them are analyzed.In connection with the problem existing in the crisis communication between the government and the media, a contrastive analysis with the experience of handling the crisis communication in the western countries is conducted in the fourth part. Aiming to learn widely from others and provide a support for the improvement of the communicative competence of our government with the media.Based on the above four parts, several suggestions and advices about how to improve the competence of our government to communicate with the media are proposed from the perspectives of government, media and society in the fifth part.This paper synthetically applies three methods, historical and document research method, the case study research method and the comparative analysis research method, to analyze the communication between our local government and media. Firstly, it is hard to conduct a field survey as it is a special crisis incident. Therefore, the research is mainly based on other scholars' essays and works, quotes and analyzes their views and data and states the author's own opinions at last. Secondly, this paper takes the Water Pollution Event in Songhua River in 2005 as a typical case to analyze the government, the media and the public's deeds in this event, aiming to learn the lesson and make clear the goals we're targeting at. At last, one separate chapter is listed to analyze the experiences and practices of the foreign media and government in crisis communication. Through the comparative analysis, the differences and the similarities will be known. Finally references and countermeasures are drawn from the comparison, which bring the statement more persuasion.