MRLC Salon Phrase III: Director Wan Xuezhong Talks about the Relationship between Law and Journalism

2015.12.21 - 2015.12.21

Director Wan Xuezhong has law educational background and rich journalism working experience. In this salon, Director Wan shared his opinions with the students on the theme of the relationship between law and journalism.

First, Director Wan pointed out that the law and journalism are not only interrelated but also different. Law and journalism have much in common. For instance, law and journalism all pursue for the truth of the fact. Moreover, law and journalism pursue the same goal. The goal of law is to pursue the fairness and justice, while the journalism is the conscience of the society. The nature of journalism is humanistic care, and its goal is to make people feel social justice. Of course, there are many differences between law and journalism. For example, the way of thinking of law and journalism is different. Although the jobs of reporters and judges are all pursuing and restoring the truth, the media reports the news fact, while the judge makes a judgment based on the legal facts. Since the news facts and legal facts do not necessarily restore the objective facts, in the same incident, media reports and legal decisions are likely to come to different conclusions.

Second, after working for so many years, Director Wan deeply feels the advantages of dual-disciplinary background. He maintained that, lawyers should have news literacy, and journalists should also have legal knowledge. For lawyers, they should learn how to deal with the media and improve their media literacy. Furthermore, for journalists, whether they have a legal background is completely different considering their performance at work. On the one hand, the reporters who do not have law education background tend to wrongly use the legal terminology. On the other hand, the reporters who have legal knowledge are easier to find legal issues in the common news, and thus find unusual report angle.

Afterwards, Director Wan took special car for example, explaining to the students how to use legal thinking and legal knowledge in the news reports. Director Wan believed that the emergence of special car could be analyzed from different angles. From an economic point of view, it is the scope of the Internet +, while from a legal point of view, it is relocation of the rights and obligations. Before the emergence of special cars, this part of rights and obligations is configured to the taxi company. Special cars’ problem is actually related to how governments manage the market and how to balance the interests of taxi companies. Besides, the special car is also related to the issue of anti-monopoly law, and if we do not limit the special car now, it is easy to create a monopoly in the future, and consumer interests would be undermined.

Finally, Director Wan re-emphasized that the law and journalism are complementary, the person who study journalism should have legal thinking, and those who study law should have news literacy. He hoped that the students can use journalism and law as two wings, by better using these two wings will enable us fly higher and farther.