A Look At Xinwen Lianbo’s Coverage Of Accident Disasters: From The Perspective Of Frame

As we all know, news media has a powerful influence on the public opinion. Especially when the public emergencies happen, people are always concerned about media coverage. CCTV, as the largest mainstream media in China, has being aware of the necessity and urgency to improve the public emergencies coverage since it paid huge price for the mistake made in 911 terrorist attacks and SARS. Accident disaster, as a type of public emergencies, is related to people’s production and daily life, so as to it is often reported by Xinwen Lianbo.This paper selects Xinwen Lianbo’s coverage of accident disasters from 2008 to 2015 as the research object and sorts out the largest reported three events from annual reports as the study sample. First, this paper makes a quantitative analysis of each year’s reporting frame on accident disasters based on reporting themes, reporting objects and reporting positions. Then, it analyses the change of the frame.This paper is composed of six parts. Part 1 is about the research background, purpose and reviews the existing research. Part 2 is research design, displaying the basic theories, methodology and samples. Part 3 is data description and analysis of annual reports. Part 4 summarizes the overall features and the change of the reporting frame from 2008 to 2015 on the topic of accident disasters. Part 5 induces the frame characteristics and the existent problems. According to the frame analysis, Part 6, the last part puts forward four proposals of improving reporting on accident disasters.The research discovers that Xinwen Lianbo’s coverage of accident disasters present generally the plot frame, but, what the majority uses is ‘consequence’ frame which shows the official actively deals with the accidents. In terms of reporting objects, ‘official’ accounts for the majority of reports and is significantly more than the ‘victims’ and ‘citizens’. From the point of reporting positions, accident disaster due to its huge destructiveness, has obvious ‘importance’ so that Xinwen Lianbo pays great attention to it.