The development of the news media in western societies coincided with the formation of a fully democratic polity based on universal suffrage, and from the outset the press and later broadcasting were assigned a central role in providing the information and argumentative resources for citizenship and in checking for abuses of power. But the commercial news media were also industries, increasingly financed by the sale of advertising, and commentators saw the search for audience maximisation moving news towards sensation. While these developments gathered momentum over many decades in the West, in Taiwan they have been compressed into two, as the country has experienced a rapid triple transformation: from authoritarian, single-party rule, to democratic politics based on multi party competition; from a state managed economy to a market-driven economy; and from a restricted media system to an open one marked by fierce competition. Many observers see this highly compressed process of change, coupled with the relative weakness of civil society, generating a particularly aggressive form of tabloidisation, a withdrawal from social responsibility and ethics, and news system ill adapted to serving the needs of a still consolidating democracy. This argument empirically through three detailed case studies of key stories places them in the context of the general changes reshaping Taiwanese news media and the original arguments over tabloidisation in the West, and concludes by exploring the possibilities for reform in the future.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:519950 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Liu, Chen-li |
| Publisher | Loughborough University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/6192 |
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