A Comparative Analysis of Media Role in 1989 Protests in China and Czechoslovakia

• Main Authors: Miessler, Jan, 梅斯勒
• Other Authors: Chu, Leonard
• Format: Others
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/22148166015607121787

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 亞太研究英語碩士學位學程(IMAS) === 102 === The thesis focuses on a Communist regime's control over the media institutions, the attitudes of the journalists towards the protests, and the media discourses before, during and after the protests in China and Czechoslovakia in 1989. It presents and debates key factors that influenced domestic media coverage of China’s Tiananmen protests and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution by comparing and discussing their impact on the outcomes of the protests. The analysis suggests that the media and journalists played somewhat contradictory or ambivalent but important roles during the protest events. The main factors influencing those roles were proximity of the given media organization to the centre of regime's political power, the proliferation of Western-style media professionalism, and differences in the Chinese and Czech political culture in the end of 1980s. The fact that in both countries, the journalists of the official media were able at least temporarily to break free from the regime's control mechanisms serves as an argument against the hypothesis of political parallelism that is still prevalent in the comparative research on media systems and points out the importance of focusing on the relationship between political power and media during regime transformation.