论近代中国新闻商品性理论之源起与演变

The Origin and Evolution of the Commodity Theory of Journalism in Modern China

新闻是否具有商品属性?是否能被看做一种商品?这是中国新闻理论界多次讨论的一个问题。对这一问题的学术史回顾,在很大程度上折射出了中国新闻理论的发展。通过梳理改革开放前国人对此问题态度的演变,发现报纸经营活动在中国古已有之,而近代报纸经营思想萌生于维新派的报刊宣传实践中;至民初,随着西方新闻商品化理论的传入,国人逐渐接受了这一思想;到20世纪三四十年代,又由于政治态度的分野而形成了两种针锋相对的观点;1949年以后,王中提出了"报纸商品性"的观点,但由于受当时政治环境的影响,这种观点遭到了一致的批判。这种变化的过程,在很大程度上受到了不同时期政治、经济、文化等社会大环境的影响。

Does journalism have the property of commodity？ Can it be seen as a commodity？ This is the question discussed repeatedly in the area of journalistic theories in China. A review of the academic history of this question, to some extent, reflects the development of Chinese journalistic theories. It finds that the newspaper business started from the ancient times; and the idea of newspaper business emerged from the publicity of the newspapers operated by the Reformative School in the modern times. In early days of Republic of China, Chinese came to accept the thought as the Western theory of journalism as commodities entered China. In the 1930s and 1940s, there were two tit-for-tat opinions on it resulting from the opposed political attitudes. After 1949, Wang Zhong held that newspapers had the property of commodity, but his view was widely criticized in the political environment then. This paper concludes that the evolution of the concept of newspaper business is largely influenced by greater social contexts in different periods by such factors as politics, economy and culture.