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... Read More

Shock Values

March 23: Unemployed community surgeon Zheng Minsheng attacks elementary school students with a knife in Nanping, Fujian, killing eight. April 9: Certified psychiatric patient hacks to death a grandmother and a student outside the gate of a school in Hepu, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. April 28: The same day that Zheng Minsheng is executed, Chen Kangbing, a former teacher, wounds 18 students in an elementary school in Leizhou, Guangdong. April... Read More

Identity Crisis

The primary thesis of Wires and Lights is that entertainment media tells the most about a people because it tries to tell us what we want to hear. So what does this season of American television tell us about Americans? Culturally, Americans are going through an identity crisis. Beliefs about who we are as a people are being challenged and shattered left and right. Of course we want to believe that regardless of past imperialist adventures, the United... Read More

The News is Pasteurized

This article is part of a continuing discussion with Yulin Zhuang about the news media. Read the first part, second part, and third part. 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... Read More

Echoes of Olympia

Just as the Olympics strives to display the forefront of the world’s athletic development, it’s also quite illuminating to take a look at the Games in terms of strides made in media and communications. The Olympics is one of the most-watched sporting events in the world, second only to the FIFA World Cup (and that record will certainly be challenged, if not utterly demolished, by the Beijing Games). The coverage of sporting events tends... Read More

Nobody to Blame

Many are surprised by the Chinese government’s open response to the quake disaster. They laud the government for having what seems to be an almost miraculous reversal of policy compared to other natural disasters—in 1976, the Chinese tried to suppress news of the Tangshan earthquake that killed 240,000 people. It covered up the Yellow River floods of the last decade, the SARS epidemic of several years ago, and the railway crash of this year.... Read More

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... Read More

Hypocrisy and Face: An Open Letter

The China-Tibet Olympics commotion depresses. We all knew CCTV was a joke. Now we are disappointed to learn that the BBC has a political agenda as well, joining what Mick Hume of The Times calls the newest Olympic sport—”China bashing.” No Pulitzers for this mess. CNN will win the gold medal in “China bashing” for mislabeling Nepalese crackdown pictures as Chinese (the single most effective Chinese propaganda tool in years—good... Read More