Media Construction And Audience Cognition Of Domestic Violence

It has been nearly two years since March 1 2016,when the Anti-Domestic Violence Law has been launched,and there are still many domestic violence cases being reported.The acts of domestic violence from public figures have brought it to the public's sight.This study aims to explore how the media constructs domestic violence through reportages,and whether there is any impact on the audience cognition,in which way to arouse public awareness about domestic violence and to some extent offer a guide and an alternative perspective for media coverage.From the perspective of media construction and frame theory,using the methods of content analysis and text analysis,this study analyzed the media construction of domestic violence based on the reports from traditional media(People's Daily and Southern Metropolis Daily)and the new media(The Paper,Netease News and Sohu News).The study found that the domestic violence was reported as a social issue and incorporated into the spectrum of public issues.The coverage on the perpetrators mainly applied the "condemnation and censure" framework.However,there are gender differentiations under the framework of "disease and externalization" and "helplessness and resistance".More specifically,the "sympathy and miserable" framework is mainly applied to victims of violence,and media reports mostly lean towards women and children,while attributing the responsibility to men,traditional culture and inadequate laws and policies.According to the statistics of the report,domestic violence in our country does not reflect gender symmetry,but there are many cases in which men becoming victims and suffer from extreme violence.This study integrates the social movement framework to analyze the reports of domestic violence,and investigates how the anti-domestic violence movement using the news media as a channel to give meanings to street performance art as equal right movement,and mobilize other non-rioters to react.Through textual analysis,this study also found the family power relations embodied in the report of domestic violence,where men and women constantly displace themselves in the power network of "domination-obey-resistance",while children,as parents' dependents,are placed at the bottom of family power relations.Finally,this study uses a questionnaire to look into the relationship between media and audience cognition.A total of 322 questionnaires were collected,including 309 valid questionnaires.This study demonstrates the correlation between media use and audience cognition,and the reports of domestic violence have an impact on audience cognition.From the theoretical perspective,the innovation of this paper lies in combining the news framework with the social movement framework.As pointed out by Guo Xiao'an and Huo Feng(2017),the study of the news framework explores discourse differentiations among news coverage from different media without acknowledging the underlying meaning construction.Therefore,this study cuts in from the perspective of social movement framework,and explores how the anti-domestic violence movement in the news coverage constructs meaning.Regarding the study sample,the previous domestic violence researches are mostly based on traditional media news,when this study also looks into the new media.This study also found that the media has gender differentiation in the construction of different perpetrators,which means that in the future when conducting research on domestic violence,we must consider the gender composition of perpetrators in order to mitigate the relevant deviations.