Forty years ago, Nixon and Mao “changed the world.” But the press who covered that historic event had more important issues to address, like Walter Cronkite’s socks and Barbara Walter’s loneliness.
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I’ve said it before, but nothing makes the CCP look more like a bunch of insecure moonbats than their fixation on “guiding public opinion” (read: censorship and propaganda). The 2009 SCIO Internet News Work training session recently wrapped up in Beijing, and over the next few days China Digital Times is publishing translated notes from the meeting. I strongly encourage readers to check out the full posts on CDT, but I couldn’t resist commenting on two sections. The first comes from Li Wufeng, Bureau Chief of the State Council Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau. In Mr. Li’s opening lecture he criticized “Small newspapers and websites republish each others’ stories, creating media hype. For example, the Deng Yujiao incident and the Hangzhou street race case.” For those of you not following “small newspapers” in China, Deng Yujiao was a woman arrested after defending herself from being raped by a local official (the official died) and the latter case involved a young man in Hangzhou who attempted to use his family’s money and influence to protect him after he killed a pedestrian while drag racing his Nouveaurichemobile. Yes…how truly horrible, if newspapers spend all of their time exposing corruption, how will they 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 We seem to be stuck in the muck, metaphorically speaking. Western critics of the CCP argue, correctly, that the government needs to do more to end media censorship, enable citizens to pursue legal remedies in court without fear of political reprisal, and to allow true freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion. Chinese defenders counter, with equal validity, that China’s harsher critics in Europe, North America and elsewhere fail to recognize the enormous strides in all areas of development, including especially economically, but also in terms of greater social and political freedoms than was the case for much the 20th century. Steve Chapman writing in the Chicago Tribune encapsulates the debate quite well: With the opening of the Beijing Olympics, outsiders are putting modern China under a microscope and finding much that is ugly. That perception is accurate but not complete. A full appreciation requires taking in the panorama of Chinese life and history, which may be hard to do in the preoccupation with the host country’s flaws. There are plenty to choose from. The government is repressive, undemocratic and often brutal. It censors news coverage, imprisons dissidents, restricts religion and maintains a monopoly on political power. So far, the Olympics UC Irvine history professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom has an article in The Nation this week about recent criticism of China. First off, let me say that I have enormous respect for Professor Wasserstrom and have enjoyed his essays a great deal. I also fundamentally agree with the general premise of his most recent piece. Professor Wasserstrom argues: I’m distressed by the tendency of so many Americans to assume that everything that goes on in China and everything about the treatment it gets is exotic and unusual. Often things that happen in or involve China are normal–even routine–and we can understand them without factoring in esoteric cultural traits or thinking of the country as a place that, in the global arena, always mysteriously gets handled with kid gloves. Fair enough. I am no big fan of “Chinese exceptionalism” whether in the field of historical research or in the discussion of contemporary issues, but the examples that Professor Wasserstrom uses in his argument beg certain questions. For example, he argues that, for all the talk of boycotts, China is hardly the first state with a poor human rights record to host the Olympic games: Take the Olympics. To read some |
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