Why did Kuo-Min-Tang's(KMT)party newspaper the Central Daily News lost the leading position in less than a decade? Why could a private newspaper the China Times became an newspaper industry giant? It was in the period of Martial Law in Taiwan,when the KMT's authoritarian system was in its heyday.How did private newspapers suddenly rose in such a high-pressure news environment and replaces the party-government newspapers? This study tries to answer the aforementioned questions.This study choose Central Daily News and China Times as study subjects,respectively representing “party-government” newspapers and private newspapers.This study based on the political economy of communication theoretical perspectives,and uses historical materials to reproduce the political,economic and international environment that a newspaper have to face in the past Taiwan.This study also reviews the history of development of the aforementioned newspapers.Moreover,this study uses content analysis method to see how contents on two newspapers' front page reflect the changes of the overall environment.KMT's news policy played a key role in the fate of this two newspapers,and its news policy was deeply influenced by its legitimacy crisis.KMT's authoritarian system was obviously against its commitment of establishing a constitutional government,this severely defect was also influenced by the western world,which would use its democracy magnifier to examine KMT's administrative style.Due to the dilemma of internal structure and the constraint from international power,KMT couldn't realize its totalitarian news concept,but had to leave a space for private newspapers to pretend that there was a free newspaper market in so called “Free China”.KMT tried to control the requirement of newspaper market and supported private newspapers with policy and economic resources to make sure they would cooperate with it in such political reality.Then KMT would utilize private newspapers to meet the needs of its publicity.Under the news control,private newspapers became "client newspapers" from perspectives of patron-client theory,so private newspaper could survive and become KMT's mouthpiece as well as “party-government” newspapers.Yet the fundamental difference in media ownership between two types of newspaper eventually led them to different endings.Party-government newspapers seemed to be more sclerotic in the rapid development of economic and social environment,because they had heavy political tasks.Meanwhile "client newspapers" were able to meet the demand of market as long as they didn't talk about KMT's political taboos.In the 1980 s,the different development directions of the two newspapers reflected the disaffection of the people under KMT's authoritarian system.In the end,the Central Daily News basically declined in the 1980 s,while the China Times became a giant in the newspaper industry.In 1988,with the lifting of the Martial Law in the previous year,Taiwan's newspaper industry was liberalized and ushered in a new era. |