Jottings from the Granite Studio

This week I have a column in the recently unveiled English-language edition of The Global Times.  This is a new gig and we’ll see how it goes.  The first column is my thoughts on Timothy Garton Ash’s recent piece in The Guardian discussing overseas media coverage and China.  My personal take is that quality of coverage ranges wildly and that even though writers should strive for objectiveness, everybody has their own biases and perceptions.  That said, the way the foreign media is presented to Chinese audiences via Anti-CNN or, for that matter, newspapers like the Global Times*, dramatically oversimiplifies the diversity and complexity of the overseas media environment, and tends to subsume criticism of the criticism into paranoid fantasies of anti-China bogeymen.  As I wrote in this week’s article:

There’s a lot of good coverage of China in the foreign media and too much bad coverage of China as well, but the idea that the “Western Media” operates as a giant cabal with the editors and producers of CNN, BBC, New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Lichtenstein Daily Bugler all gathering once a month in a secret underground bunker listening as a clone of Henry Luce strokes a white