Anti-social Behavior
Shortly after Google’s social networking platform, Google+, was launched on June 28, reports sprung up of it being blocked by the Chinese government. On June 30, The Guardian used two sites (Great Firewall of China and Just Ping) to ping plus.google.com from a Chinese server and, after failing to reach the site, concluded that the government [...]
Tittle-Tattle Fatigue
I’m a regular CCTV viewer. Hand to God.
However, most shows I watch grudgingly because I can’t avoid it. Living with a Chinese partner in a miniscule one-bedroom apartment has forced me to accept the ubiquity of the television in the Chinese household—it is switched on in the morning and in the evening, and left on at full volume. Why? Just because. It is only recently that I’ve come to see the striking similarity between the television itself and the programming it broadcasts.
Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone
Picture this. A top official of a powerful state newspaper stands before a room of journalism students and flatly admits that their government has been lying to them, changing facts in the news or omitting them altogether. The hero of a dystopian novel? A whistle-blower who’s had enough?
Just the opposite. Xia Lin, the deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, was giving a lecture entitled “Understanding Journalistic Protocols for Covering Breaking News” at the Tianjin Foreign Studies University in which he defended the practice of massaging the truth when it comes to news, citing the critical role of media to maintain societal stability. The examples he gave were shocking, but only confirmed what most skeptical human beings believe: that their government lies to them on a daily basis.
Burying the Lead
It’s difficult for me to judge just how Orwellian China’s carefully groomed, state-run news coverage is: in America, coverage of the news is centered around the image of the news program or network; not the state. I do follow the BBC, therefore state-run media is not entirely out of my experience; but the BBC news website has not reported this story…
The News is Pasteurized
Last Thursday on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Jon Stewart interviewed CNBC financial host Jim Cramer for the good part of a half-hour. It was a culmination of a week-long series of segments in which the The Daily Show attacked CNBC, a financial news network, for failures to responsibly or accurately report on the economic meltdown or any of its warning signs.
Afterward, the majority of news outlets framed the interview as a personal victory of Stewart over Cramer, the end of a “war of words” or the clash between two media personalities, saying that “Stewart won by knockout” or that “Stewart wrecked Cramer.” The fact that the news media focused on the personalities and less on the substance of the interview only reinforces a point made by Stewart
Homogenizing News
I had a very frustrating conversation with a Chinese woman once. She was a bright, intelligent person, web-savvy (she was a computer programmer), and on her way to Redmond to work at Microsoft. We began talking about the news, and I may have said some disparaging things about the reliability of the Chinese media. What surprised me was the sudden vehemence of her reaction. She was quite offended by the insinuation that the Chinese media was not trustworthy, and countered by telling me that the Western media was just as biased and unreliable. “How do you know that what they say is true? So how can you say that what the Chinese media says is not true? Maybe it’s not always completely true, but the West is just as bad.”
The End of News Freedom?
No, The New York Times will not die. Neither will The Washington Post; at the very least, their robust national circulation and storied history will make them viable—if not necessarily profitable—arms of whatever multinational conglomerate currently owns them or may own them in the future. No, what we should be worried about are the Chicago Tribunes and the Los Angeles Times of the nation, the Houston Chronicles and the Sacramento Bees. The non-national papers are the ones that will suffer the most from the current newspaper crisis, and in some ways they are the ones most critical for the lifeblood of the American journalistic institution.
The End of Free News
Recently, there’s been quite a spate of articles proclaiming the death of news as we know it. Newspapers are teetering on the edge of financial insolvency, shedding staff like bad dandruff, and bemoaning the popularity of aggregation sites like The Huffington Post (or, for example, our own site). A number of suggestions have been floated to solve the problem, mostly involving making people pay for the news access that they currently get for free on the web. But will this alone be enough?
For the People
During the April 9 broadcast of the CNN news program The Situation Room, commentator Jack Cafferty was asked about the relationship between the United States and China. He replied:
Well, I don’t know if China is any different, but—our relationship with China is certainly different. We’re in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We also are running hundred of billions of dollars worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart. So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years…
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