Subject and Text: A Comparison of Tuchman and Said’s Thought on News Construction

Influenced by the western social construction trend, both Tuchman and Said regarded news as the product of construction. Tuchman’s book Making News elaborated the theory of news construction and became a model for news production research; Said, who put forward the concept of “Orientalism”, has attracted much attention in the fields of postcolonialism and comparative literature studies, but his thoughts on news are seldom discussed. By comparison, it is found that Tuchman demonstrates the constructive role of news with the subjectivity of journalists and denies the “truth” of news value; Said discusses the construction nature of news around the text, generates the view of “text construction”, and dispels the “truth” of news at the level of fact and value. Both of them understand the news in the narrative paradigm of constructivism, and believe that the reporter is limited by the “position” of the journalist’s role, the text is the product of contextualization, and media use the power of covering to implement construction. Said confirmed and promoted Tuchman’s news construction thought and innovated news construction theory. He has not only broadened the scope of news construction theory with discourse theory, but also advocated intellectuals to use construction to counter the construction of power, which played the role of news construction.