A Study on the Characteristics of Media's Stigmatizing Reports related to Experts from the Perspective of Frame Theory

摘要: Under the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, social issues are emerging more frequently, and the guidance of experts on public social life is becoming increasingly important. However, on the Internet, media outlets tend to quote experts out of context, stigmatizing the experts and causing their credibility to decline constantly. This study selected media reports about experts that appeared in the Weibo Hot Search Topics from mid-2022 to early 2023, using frame theory as theoretical support and combining Fairclough's discourse analysis theory with other text research methods to compare and analyze the reported texts and the original experts' statements from multiple dimensions. The study finds that the media constructed an aggressive persuasive framework, shaped a dualistic oppositional conflict perspective by adapting texts and contexts, and stript experts of their professionalism and academic nature, which created a parental, provocative, and unprofessional media image of experts as a result. This is closely related to the pursuit of interests and social ecology of online media under the "Eyeball Economy," posing challenges and obstacles to building trust between experts and the public.