When this photo was taken and then showed on the micro-blogging, there are so many different voices towards the picture. As WANGYI News, a big Chinese news platform, said the leader ordered his subordinate to back him because he wore expensive shoes, which cannot be accessed to the water. And there are also other news platforms, such as Tencent, pointing out that the man volunteers to take up his leader as soon as the leader was ready to take off these shoes to cross the flood, because they were good friends in their childhood, besides, the shoes that the leader wore are cloth shoes not luxury. In addition to this, this picture is fake news, the relationship of them was ‘father and son’. To be honest, at that time, nobody knew the reality of the news. However, recently, because the new Chinese chairman, Mr.xi, compats corruption very strictly and people always heard negative news about corrupt official, the impression of official in people’s mind was downside. Hence, people were willing to believe the news that WANGYI broadcasted and regard the leader as a greedy official. And then, internet users altogether attack the leader. Due to the one-sided public opinion, some media also change their mind to denounce the leader, who became the target of public criticism.
Nevertheless, ironically, with the further research to the leader, it was identified that the Tencent was right. The two officials are good friends, and at that day, the leader wore a pair of cloth shoes, but because of the flood, he wanted to take off his shoes, but at that time, his friend took him up, so we saw such scene on the photo.
From this event, we can see two aspects will influence the news reporting: government policy and public opinion. Because of government policy to combat corporation, media will take the government’s fancy so that they always want to exposure some greedy officials. The media thought in this way, they afford the responsibility of the society, so the public always see the news about corruption. Gradually, every official in China is a greedy official, which makes sense that the form of the public opinion mentioned above. Public opinion also make the force to the news reporting, and some media will change what they believe to cater the public interests.
In news values terms (how journalists judge newsworthy stories), this would be an excellent example of 'consonance' - the 'corruption' framing fits with journalists expectations (and, they imagine, their audience's expectations) about how the world works. It also suggests that a more adversarial form of reporting about politics is emerging in China, as long as it is limited to corrupt individuals rather than political institutions or other structures as a whole. This is how 'watchdog' journalism works in the UK and US, but it is often criticised for being superficial in its personalisation of issues and for being too quick to jump to conclusions, which is a problem successfully identified here. It is intriguing that the shift has been led by a government crackdown, and it would be interesting to know how this relates to online media campaigns (e.g. against the 'smiling official' found to have stolen property at the site of an accident).
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