Research On The Change Of Media Discourse In The Communication Of China's Environmental Crisis

The environmental communication,an emerging field is born when the new issues evolved by environmental crisis continues to threaten a national traditional governance order.The research orientation of “environmental crisis communication and management” with the advantage of discipline positioning in this field is not only the main field of environmentally meaningful production and discourse competition,but also the key to acquire and understand the inherent characteristics of environmental communication.However,the current research objects generally remain in the air pollution issue represented by ''haze'' so that the research on water pollution issues lacks attention to a certain extent.Meanwhile,the research path is still a comparative analysis of single cases among different media.Hence,if we explore the media construction of major sudden water pollution incidents across China,it will not only provide a relatively complete perspective for grasping the inherent properties of environmental communication,but also create breakthrough in the research path in this field.Namely,the regularity exploration across time and space could be realized by the means of the linear analysis of a single case and single-sense thinking in a single time and space.From the perspective of media construction theory,this paper employs content analysis methods to investigate 1160 valid samples of 18 typical major sudden water pollution incidents from 1994 to 2018.And the social functions of the media are supposed to be highlighted by analyzing the characteristics of the environmental crisis,the environmental proposition of those media at different stages and what kinds of media advocated and defined by environmental claims during the 24 years.The study finds that environmental crisis communication of the issue of topical attention is characterized by the distribution of two ''M'' shapes plus one ''L'' during the 24 years,which is greatly consistent with the ''Media Agenda Cycle'',a circular pattern proposed by McComas and Shanahan.Therefore,this paper divides the 24-year-old environmental crisis communication stage into four reporting periods: issue formation—transition—enhancement period and issue transition period.A ''three-legged'' communication network and a ''closed-loop'' interaction model are established based on linearity and the structural source distribution characteristics form in the four propagation cycles.Therefore,the government,the media and the public enterprises are no longer a simple ''stimulus-response'' relationship,but an interactive form of ''negotiation-conflict-game-cooperation'' based on the development of events and time.The theme evolution changes from a single pattern to a combined change path in the dynamic development of structural environmental crisis.The 1160 valid samples over 24 years cover 72 topics and aggregat into 10 story topics which sublimate a framework of fact,control,reflection and early warning.And the theme diffusion is characterized by water pollution control and the image of a big country—water pollution crisis and environmental refugees—water pollution responsibility distribution and environmental justice—water pollution response and environmental governance concept.The above-mentioned four characteristics respectively correspond with the following four media discourse changes: environmental decision-making discourse under environmental regulation,the crisis discourse indicating disaster,the conflicting discourse of accusation and jealousy and the economic discourse of wealth.And then media functions are brought into playing at different stages,namely,pollution tonicization,media warning,mood releasing and issues politicizing.The study of media discourse changes spanning 24 years of environmental crisis runs through the observation of the interaction among people,things and society.The survival priority discourse led by the topic of ''human health'' has given birth to the performance test indicators of current environmental governance ability;the media has increased the number of appearances of victims of water pollution and the public has also emerged as the leader of the personal environment right from the best candidates for the transfer of water pollution risks or the ''hostage'' image of local elites and enterprises.Simultaneously,from the early warning of pollution crisis,the media has changed to the collective accountability under the legal framework to the environmental punishment of responsibility.Therefore,from the theme construction of the event governance results to the identification of the involved enterprises and the environmental responsibility of the local government,it is observed that the concept of enlightenment in China's environmental communication has come to an end and it also predicts that China's environmental crisis will begin to enter the critical time of interest game among subjects.