Lecturer

This paper introduces and discusses the main perspectives of the book China's Window on the World: TV News,Social Knowledge and International Spectacle.It also briefly reviews the history of media studies in the view of sociology of knowledge and rethinks the relationship between social ...

Based on the textual analysis for the newspaper coverage of health care reform and interviews with commentary authors, this article is aimed to examine the linkage of the social structure and media discourses production in Mainland China within the framework of sociology of knowledge. By examing media’s public presentation function and opinion expression function, this paper finds a duality of the relationship between media and power networks, which includes emerging civic discourses on the one hand and the party-state authoritarianism on the other hand. In other words, China’s media production has an unclear vision.

Keywords: Producing society; Media presentation; Opinion expression

Abstract: This article reviews the methodological individualism and the methodological collectivism in the studies of news commentary and proposes the methodological relationalism which can connect the individual and the collective, the micro and the macro. From perspective of relationalism, the paper analyses the expression of commentary authors’ opinion and the power network they positioned based on the first- hand interview materials.
Key words：Methodological Relationalism；News commentary; Power Network

This article interprets the news commentary in the market-oriented media as a symbolic action of interest articulation in the social context of interest differentiation since late 1990s. The research shows that news commentary partly serves as public interest articulation via legitimized discourse construction. A public event containing trust crisis is the focus of the expression of public interest， and in it the logic of legitimate process and the logic of power-interest are interwoven. Although the current mechanism of conveying public opinions is not transparent， the expression of such opinions by the media still has the symbolic function of verbal disobedience of great social and political consequences.

Keywords： news commentary， interest articulation， civil rights， verbal disobedience

Audience research is a crucial area of theoretical communication innovation in the new media environment. By examining the academic project of ‘Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies’ funded by the European Cooperation Project in Science and Technology, this article analyzes the innovative ideas of European audience research from the perspective of the interaction between knowledge production and societal contexts. This project includes four mains issues: media literacy in the new media environment; audience interactivity and participation; the role of Information and Communication Technology use when involving social relationships; and audience transformation and social integration. By analyzing the academic vein of these issues, this article determines the theoretical trends and social meanings of European audience research, naming the construction of a new ‘audience participation paradigm’ in the new media environment.