The Effects From The Development Of The Metropolis Daily On Civic Awareness

With the acceleration of urbanization, the Metropolis daily, as the most activeinformation-carrying platform contemporarily in China, becomes an important source ofinformation and an indispensable way of knowing the outside world to more and more people.Because of the very development, the Metropolis daily begins to bear some certain socialresponsibilities as well. From the sole role of providing information to the important tool ofexpressing public opinions, the Metropolis daily carries the duty of accelerating the soundprogress of the society. With the platform, all kinds of information can be exchanged, whichplays an important role on building up good communicating relationships among the government,the media and the citizen. And most importantly, the civic awareness gets promotion through theplatform.This study with sociological perspective focuses on the civic awareness, bottoms onfunctionalism theory, uses such methods as quantitative social statistics and qualitative documentanalysis, samples37sheets among five kinds of newspapers of three different patterns and thenexamines the influences on the civic awareness exerted by the development of Metropolis dailies.Civic awareness, as a prominent feature of the civic society’s rising, is not only the undertakingof one’s own interests and rights and social responsibilities but also a kind of personal care to thenation and the world as well. It’s mainly embodied by ones’ enjoying of rights of information,expressing and participating in social activities. But what’s the relationship between theawareness and the development of Metropolis dailies? This thesis just begins with the problem,and by comparing among the Metropolis daily, Party organ and the elite newspaper, anappreciable correlation is discovered. As a result, it is obvious that the Metropolis dailypossesses more forms and qualities helping promoting civic awareness compared with the Partyorgan. The information content, news operating methods, public participation, newspapers’attention on the public and the role of the opinion leaders, all of these show great differencesbetween them. So we can see the positive progress of civic awareness brought about by the development of the Metropolis daily.However, we should also see the effects from the Metropolis daily as a double-edged swordwith both active and passive faces, as the Metropolis daily encounters more limitations andobstructions compared with the elite newspaper besides the political control,still the overcommercialization after the marketization, kitsch as well as the fragmentation after theinformation explosion. All these factors affect the enhancement of the civic awareness, andfurther, reveal the crisis and the bottleneck of Metropolis daily’s following development.Therefore, the media, as a social instrument or the party’s mouthpiece or even" the fourth power”,all in all, should always put its responsibility at first place, always play an important part in thesocial observation, and adhere to the standpoint of the majority.