Page 123 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 5. The Sun Zhigang incident

Tencent.com, 586 results came up between 2003 and 2016. I then filtered the

results by content and title, and around 200 items related to the Sun case were
found.
• Sohu news and NetEase news: When searching reports in Sohu News and
NetEase News, the searches would automatically go to their affiliated search
engines (Sogou Search and Youdao Search), which expanded the search scope

to the entire internet. Therefore, it was not possible to trace back the original
reports produced by the two web portals. The search result of NetEase even
gives an error message saying that the content contains keywords that cannot

be found. This may because the original reports are broken or were deleted
after the website updates. Thus, for the research, I did not collect data from
these two sites.
• People.cn: In this state-owned media site, there were 1,027 pieces of news
and articles about the ‘Sun Zhigang incident’ from 2003 to 2016 found by

searching the context field on the news section of People.cn. After being
searched by title, the results yielded 36 entries of ‘Sun Zhigang case’ and
17 entries for the ‘Sun Zhigang incident’. Also, there were at least 60 items

of news, articles and commentaries from the period between 25 April and
22 June 2003. Additionally, as with Sina news, People.cn also has a special
column on the Sun Zhigang incident. The content of the column is not only
about the story of Sun and its follow-ups, but also includes professional com-
mentaries written by public intellectuals, offering insights and suggestions

on the management of migrants and reviews of the new policy – Measures of
Aid and Management of Urban Vagrants Beggars without Life Support. As a
governmental web portal, it played a vital role in handling the Sun Zhigang

incident from the media side and effectively led public opinion in a positive
direction.
• Tianya BBS: There have been 7,677 posts about the case based on a search
by context and relevancy. While searching by title and relevancy, 483 results
appeared, of which 153 posts were made between 25 April and 22 June 2003.

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