A Primary Study Of The Public-welfare Behavior Of The Mass Media

Recent years, the public welfare undertakings of our country develop quickly. It attributes not only to our national policies but also to the active participation of the mass media. On one hand, the mass media record and communicate public welfare information as recorder; on the other hand, it propagates the philosophy of public welfare. What's more, it directly engages in the public welfare undertakings as organizer. The involvement of mass media injects some freshness into our public welfare undertakings and also brings prospects to it.This thesis makes a macroscopic study of the public-welfare behavior of mass media through searching the related cases which happened between 2006 and 2015. By adapting the method of categorizing, case study and data statistics, the author mainly analyzes the types, motivations, characteristics, effects and some related controversies of the mass media's public-welfare behaviors.The study shows: our mass media have been making lots of innovations on the type of their public-welfare behaviors. Some new types emerge continuously, such as, media public welfare fund, public welfare project, public communication union, public welfare seminar and public welfare online shop etc. Apart from taking social responsibility and finishing political propaganda tasks, economic benefit is a huge driving power of mass media's public-welfare behaviors. The economic motivation can be classified as five categories:enhancing brand image, handling PR crisis, chasing advertisement income, promoting media programs and improving the overall ranking. Presently, public-welfare activities have developed into a new threshold of profitability of mass media. Through organizing and undertaking the public-welfare activities of other commercial enterprises, mass media can both establish good image and earn high advertising income and activity contracting charges. It is mass media that is the biggest winner of all the public-welfare activities and TV shows.Mass media's public-welfare behaviors have the characteristics of collectiveness,amateurism and non-government. Their behaviors are special. Mass media is a mixture of public institution and profit-making enterprise which makes it a special identity. And compared with other enterprises, it builds platforms as its main forms of participating in public-welfare undertakings. It also owns a natural PR platform to propaganda its good deeds. The public-welfare behavior of mass media not only awakened the public philosophy of people, but also improved the perfection of our country's public welfare system. What is more pleasing is that its social image and economic benefits are also improved. But it compromised its public credibility and journalistic professionalism when it tried to do false public deeds and report deceptive public-welfare news together with some commercial enterprises.As mass media have crossed their own business boundary, and participates the publicwelfare undertakings more and more frequently. Some scholars begin to doubt its rationality.The controversies are as follow: whether the mass media is suitable to take the charity marketing method; whether the amateurism of mass media will be bad for the development of the long term development of public-welfare program; whether mass media are qualified to fundraising publicly. The trans-boundary of media to public-welfare undertakings is an inevitable result of the development of the public-welfare undertakings, we should review it objectively. However, mass media should grasp the scale of their behavior. It is better for them to improve the development of our public-welfare undertakings through news report than other methods.