The Study Of Media Stimatization Under The Horizon Of Risk Society

There are constant disasters and accidents around the world such as September 11 terrorist attacks, SARS, Indonesian tsunami, Wenchuan earthquake, Mexican gulf oil spill, influenza A (H1N1). All of these have shown that risk is everywhere. The human society has passed industrial society and entered a "risk society" era.But at the same time, modern society is also a mediated society. Mass media is not only to exchange information, but also to affect people's political life, social values and reconstruct the people's emotion world and ideology with strong power. With people's high dependence on the media, the media has influenced every aspect of social organizations and life. The economic and social function caused by risk events will be decided not only by the biological and physical effects of the events but also by the perceived risk factor, media report and signal value. It is no news that some media stigmatize the object of the report. In the traditional society, the stigmatized object of media generally involved specific someone or some kind of people. However, the object has changed from people to all sorts of things in risk society. Media stigma in risk communication will directly influence audience's risk perception. It will arouse potential risks, enlarge original risks and lead to new risks, also bring negative influences on social security and stability.This paper will have a research on media stigmatization under the horizon of risk society theory which has realistic meaning. It will combine risk society theory with journalism communication theory at first, then relate to the hotspots in risk communication closely and try to find out the approach of media stigmatization at last. Through the study, the author finds that there are some problems in risk communication which stigmatized the object due to some errors in report strategy, report ways and language they use. Some of them even bring about serious consequences, which would enlarge the risk of the society and produce new risk from the objective aspect. Combing some typical cases of media risk reports, this paper will analyze the risk caused by the media stigmatized report from three aspects including topic selection of media reports, media emotional tendencies and one-sided view of the media.After the analysis of the formation of media stigmatization path, the paper will try to find out its cause of formation further. Analyzing from the angle of sociology and journalism, the main reasons are the uncertainty of risk information itself, the lack of authority in risk society, the severe competition between current media and the inherent cognition of the media staff. By doing the research, there will be several advantages. Firstly, it will be a reference for better media risk communication. Then, it will be good for the audience to get right cognition about the risk and carry right measures. At last, it will be beneficial to consummate risk management system in China.It should be pointed out here that this paper just briefly discusses the path and causes of media stigmatization under the horizon of risk society but does not analyze the measures and methods to deal with the problems. In the future, there should be more study on the social functions of media in risk society and how to prevent media stigmatization in risk communication.