News and Ideological Exegesis in Chinese Online Media: A Case Study of Crime Coverage and Reader Discussion on Two Commercial Portals

Abstract

Analyzing news stories, commentaries, and readers’ discussions of a sensational serial murder case on China’s two most popular commercial online portals, this study examines how the Internet’s medium-specific characteristics of unlimited space and interactivity facilitate both reinforcement and challenges to dominant ideologies of crime coverage. The study finds that news accounts on the two portals, Sina.com and Sohu.com, to a large degree favored the interests of the powerful over the powerless, excusing the inefficiency of the police and portraying causes of crime as individual; while readers contributing to online forums on the case voiced concern about social issues underlying crime, expressed standpoints of the poor and underprivileged, and questioned the authority and intentions of the powerful. The result was that, even as news accounts generally reinforced prevailing social relations, readers’ comments upturned them with analyses of inequality, poverty and discrimination. The study lends additional weight to the assertion that the Internet’s unlimited space and allowance for simultaneous interactivity among many voices are leading to qualitative changes in public communications as well as quantitative increases in information flow. Even within the context of Chinese information control, online forums open up new options for users that we characterize as exegetical, implying broad possibilities for explanation and exposition as well as for alternative ideological renderings.