The American tradition of institutionally-and-professionally-focused approach to journalism, news production and media studies has dominated the academic arena of media and news sociology in the Chinese context in the past decade. This bias has led to relative neglect of alternative approaches, especially those from non-American background, such as the British Cultural Studies, represented by Stuart Hall. It is argued in this paper Hall and his major works on media sociology in the British context, provided an useful alternative paradigm that, based on a semiotic tradition, highlights the concept of “structures of meaning” and the complex connections between media and specific historical conjuncture of political economic and ideological conditions. In order to critically evaluate the cultural studies approach to media sociology, in this paper, major works by Stuart Hall dealing with news and media issues are systematically reviewed and compared with the dominant paradigm.