My answers to the two questions:

I found two pieces of news about the result of the Taiwan General Elections in 2016. The screen shots are shown below. The first one is selected from BBC News while the second one is selected from China Daily.

First of all, if we look at the headline, we can clearly see the opinions of the newspapers toward Tsai Ing-wen. In BBC News, Tsai Ing-wen was elected, which implies that she was supported by the majority of people in Taiwan. She was elected Taiwan’s first female president. The phrase ‘first female president’ is definitely a positive one to describe a woman. ‘First’ is quite a strong word and the phrase is active. Therefore, Tsai Ing-wen must be an unprecedentedly successful.

However, if we look at the headline of the article from China Daily, we will find it very negative. It used a metaphor to compare Tsai Ing-wen being elected with ‘a ticking time bomb’. The word ‘bomb’ is a fairly negative word with an impression of dangerous and devastating. It is active and quite strong. The adjective ‘ticking time’ makes the bomb even more dangerous since no one could tell when it will explode. As a result, the stance of China Daily is really clear: Tsai Ing-wen will be bad for the relationship between China government and Taiwan government.

Moreover, I found that the words they chose very interesting. BBC News described Tsai Ing-wen as a ‘president’ while in China Daily she was a ‘leader’. Similarly, the speech she made was a ‘victory speech’ according to BBC News but a ‘inauguration speech’ in China Daily’s words. So they used the words to show their opinions towards the cross-strait issues: BBC News does not admit that Taiwan is part of China, however, China Daily insisted on the view that Taiwan belongs to China.

2.

There is an immature idea in my mind to make the journalists as neutral as possible. An international media corporation could be set up to play a role similar to the Unite Nations in the world of journalists. It will not belong to any country and it could encourage international cooperation. It can hire staff from all over the world, however, in order to make sure that it would not have too many staff from a single country, say the US, it would have to impose quotas on the number of people it is going to hire from each country. The quotas would be based on the GDP and the population of that country. And the money to operate the corporation may come from all the governments in the world. Also, the money they are going to pay are discussed based on their GDP. Since the corporation is collectively owned by the governments hence by the citizens in the countries, so the corporation would not have pressure from advertisers or the flak. If a government is imposing pressure on the corporation and wants to filter some information out, the other governments may not allow. So the people who are trying to hide information have to think of the reactions from foreign countries.

The journalists from all over the world would work together. They can also use citizen journalism to minimize the effect of the sourcing. Journalists are distributed to different countries and regions. For example, in Hong Kong, there would be local journalists and foreign journalists (all from the corporation). Local journalists would be more familiar with the society but foreign may see the issues from a different perspective. Therefore, the local journalists would write the report and there could be comments from the foreign journalists attached. Under this kind of structure, the citizens would know more opinions towards the same issue. And if the foreign journalists touches the ideological marginalization, the citizens would not blame them too much and they are able to leave that country any time they want.

It looks a bit similar to the relevant exchange model that we discussed during the tutorial, but I think the main difference is that the large corporation is not owned by somebody and actually every person is ‘donating’ money to it (kind of in a compulsory way). So each citizen does not have to pay that much and the corporation will be able to run without the control of a single government or organization.