| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 傳播管理研究所 === 94 === In a modern democratic society, election has become the most common way in which people participate in politics. Moreover, voting is the presentation and consequences of people’s opinions. Therefore, during the period of election, all the information people saw or heard through the mass media might influence people’s decisions of their votes, their attitudes, and their behaviors. Along with the strengthening of Taiwan’s democracy, the political cultures in Taiwan have been changing. Meanwhile, the interactions between politicians and mass media and the distributions of powers have been changing. The relationships between the political systems and the news media are multiple and complicated.
The reporters, the elementary gate keeper, are certainly the first target the candidates want to influence. The various ways of influence, either “threatening” or “seduction”, create “pressure” on the reporters when they report news relevant to the election. Thus, the motivation and purposes of this study were to investigate the strategies the reporters employed when they encountered pressure.
This study made use of questionnaires to collect data. This study surveyed the reporters in the big Kaohsiung area (Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County) to analyze “the strategies the reporters employed when they encountered pressure.” This study recruited 113 valid questionnaires. The results show that when the reporters reported news relevant to the 2004 legislators’ election, the pressure the reporters in the big Kaohsiung area received was lobbying, followed by advertisements and other stress related to profits. The pressure from the news office was also common. As a result, the attempts to influence news about the election were multiple. As for the pressure from the gangsters, it was rare; less than 10 percent of the subjects had ever received such pressure.
As far as the strategies employed, a high percentage of the reporters in the big Kaohsiung area adopted the strategy “compromise”, followed by “direct confrontation” and “ignorance”. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that “compromise” was the most frequent strategy adopted by the reporters when they received pressure from the news office. This finding illustrates that the key influence on the reporters came from the controlling power of the media organizations. When it comes to the advertisements and other stress related to profits, the reporters usually employed the strategies “compromise” and “cooperation”; the percentage reached 80%. Such an overwhelming percentage demonstrates the serious interference from the departments of advertisements and businesses in news reports.
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