re: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/7/12/can-china-gain-journalistic-credibility/what-chinese-reporters-face

Note: I have worked with - and, as a fully-contracted employee, for - a mainland Chinese television network since 2006. I am currently a contracted consultant with the same entity.  What I suggest herein resonates with what I have stated elsewhere.  I attemped to post this comment on-line, in the comments section to this thread (supra).  The attempt was not unsuccessful.  I'm not sure why.

Edited 13 July 2010, at 7.20pm.

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The channel for which I work - Zhejiang Radio & Television Group's "International Channel" - began broadcasting to overseas viewers in the summer of 2006. I was recruited to join the channel in August of that year, having been poached from Intouch Zhejiang magazine, of which I was executive managing editor for about a year, and in which capacity I helped launch Hangzhou Weekly newspaper, the first (and only) English-language weekly newspaper in Zhejiang Province.  The latter was and is published in cooperation with and under the auspices of the Hangzhou municipal ministry of news and infromation; the latter was obliquely supported by the provincial level of the same organs, and is currently operating under the umbrella of the That's brand of publications. That's was founded in the late 1990's in Shanghai by British national Mark Kitto, and remained under his control until he was nudged away from the helm by larger competing interests.  (Google him.)

Word was, as I heard it at the time, that the ZRTVG International Channel  was cooked-up in response to a top-down directive from Beijing, which offered incentives for regional networks that expanded internationally-broadcast  programming aimed at the  Chinese diaspora. It seems that Beijing was concerned that the hua'qiao ("Overseas Chinese", pronounced "hwa chow") community was partial to Taiwanese programming, and that such mainland programming as existed was failing to win (or keep) mainland hearts and minds. There was the fact, too, that hua'qiao communities tend often to maintain strong links with their hometowns, and abroad tend also to stay close-knit. For that reason,  it was hoped that demographic-specific programming (from Zhejiang, for overseas Zhejiangnese) would be attractive to at least two categories of viewer: homebound housewives of Chinese businessmen (who themselves have little time for television), and the greying parents who have at last been brought over to the new world from China. The other (but not the last) item on the agenda was the children of Overseas Chinese. These may or may not speak the local topolect of the parents, but they probably do not speak Mandarin (pu'tong'hua), and generally know little about their ancestral homeland. Hopes were that our limited amount of bi-lingual (English and Mandarin) programming would strike a chord with the kids, who - growing-up overseas - were rapidly losing touch with their Chinese roots. (This, by the way, is something Beijing is very worried about: the assimilation of overseas Chinese youth, who grow up French, Dutch, Australian, etc., marry outwith the Chinese community, and cease to support - ideologically, or otherwise - the development of China.) 

Two weeks ago, in late June of this year, I met for the first time with the new head of programming for our channel -- Mr G.  Mr G stands about six-two, and the morning we met was dressed like the Land's End model he more or less resembles. His English is excellent - impressively so - and he's seen more of the United States than I have. I liked him immediately, and he seems to have disliked me less than many of my colleagues.

I asked Mr G directly if my understanding of our programming brief and our agenda is as I had long understood it to be. He took one of my Double Happiness cigarettes, nodded, and commented with admirable frankness. Yes, he said, I'm half right. "But we are trying to make excellent programming that will compete with other Chinese international channels, and be excellent in our own right. This is our biggest challenge".

It is a big challenge --- and it is CNC World's challenge, too. Our channel draws very little in ad revenue.  Funding comes mainly from the state. That doesn't mean that we are at the beck and call of Beijing, but it does mean that we have to take programming opportunities as they come.  Let me explain.

The show I first co-hosted was named "Made in Zhejiang" --  you can find some episodes on-line (www.cztvworld.com).  We visited Zhejiang-based manufacturers and companies, and told their story -- how scrappy bosses pulled themselves up out of obscurity (and often poverty) and founded multi-million dollar entities.  We toured factories, spoke to workers, and from the shop floor to the executive suite captured their story on professional-grade videotape. It was good copy, and to be perfectly honest the weakest link in the chain was usually me.

Funding for the program was limited, but we had all the right green lights, and the government liked what we were doing. We were celebrating the commercial achievments of China's first generation of entrepreneurs, and in so doing we were helping to put a good spin on "Made in China" and build the Zhejiang brand. Each episode was a 20-minute epic that began with adversity and ended with triumph, a tale of scientific development with Chinese characteristics.  

We didn't need government officials telling us how to tell the story, or how not to probe factory workers about wages, work conditions, and accommodation arrangements -- though, frankly, we weren't in the horror-story sweatshops anyway, and in any event our fluffiest show was still more honest than any given episode of Ghost Hunters.  Almost all of our "directors" were under 30, and they did everything from direct shooting to write the script, slap together a rough storyboard, and oversee editing -- most in fact did the editing themselves. The directors were proud of these entrepreneurs, and admired them; they also loved (or at least liked) their job.

Work in a Chinese television station is about as good as it gets in China. If you're a director, host, or camera operator, you get to travel, sample local cuisine, and stay in decent hotels. Salaries aren't high, but your business cards are cool, and there's an ample ammount of freedom -- and don't let the "media studies" wags tell you otherwise.  In our unit, we had 20-something-year-old directors running small crews and hobnobbing with China's millionaires. One of our youngest directors pulled a few national awards, ensuring that her rise up the ladder would be smooth. (I was the host of some of these award-winning shows.  She didn't share the honors.)   We were all on a long leash, and supervision for "Made in Zhejiang" consisted of little more than getting approval for the subject of the program, and a  screening of first-edits  by our channel's bosses. Nice work if you can get it. 

And that's Chinese media: You know what side your bread is buttered on, and only the very  stupid throw it on the carpet butter-side down.

Viewers liked "Made in Zhejiang":  each episode was a tribute to Zhejiang, and her people. Station brass liked it: it was good copy, cheap to make, and people actually watched it. The government liked it: it showed the Chinese as a commerically-astute, hard-working, innovative and enterprising people, pulling themselves, their families, their communities, and their country up by the bootstraps. The fact that we were state-funded seems not to have compromised what we did and how we did it."Win win", as the Chinese love to say.

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Coverage of China by American media (perhaps Western media generally) does indeed seem  hostage to a small number of presuppositions and prejudices about the Chinese state, the people, and the relationship between the latter and the former; and when combined with the standard strategic journalistic modus operandi (viz, shock when one can be credibly shocking, otherwise inform in a way that conforms to reader/viewer expectations), the picture of China and her people tends to be distorted, in ways that have long since become predictable: The simmering discontent of the Chinese people for their unelected leaders - now bubbling, now boiling, but always warmer than room temperature - is almost always the ideological mis en scene. This paradigm has long since passed its best-by date, and China's new international news agency might serve to correct this unfortunate distortion. We need however to know more about the average mainland Chinese journalist.

I have worked with Chinese journalists, and for a while lectured to bilingual broadcasting majors at one of China's premiere media and communications universities --- and here's something participants in this discussion need to know:  If you're mainland Chinese, and are training for (or aspiring to) a career in journalism (or on-air broadcasting), then you know from the earliest days that you are going into marketing, not news. That is the basic rule - one could say, the only rule - that undergraduates, under-studies, and interns in the empire's media industry need at all times to remember; and they tend not only to remember this rule but embrace it.  Buttered-side: up. Don't drop it.

What then becomes of China's "real" writers and journalists? The investigators and whistle-blowers, the diggers, the question-askers? Silenced? Marginalized? Ah, there's the rub. The problem here is in the way this question is phrased, and in the assumptions inherent in it.

In the West, we tend to associate "real journalism" with grit -- with tough-got information that either conforms to and confirms  our fears (e.g., corruption documented, demonstrated, and exposed), or surprises us (corruption discovered where it wasn't expected). There's a blood trail (literally or figuratively), and someone's about to have his head laid upon the block (literally or figuratively).  Great. "Good news" is viewed with suspicion (and is called propaganda), "community affairs" stuff is denounced as "filler" (unless the community affair is the take-down of the serial killer living next door), while bad news makes for good copy. Media reform in China has given readers/viewers more bad (and therefore: "good") news copy about their country, but local news networks are as likely as not to have features that aim to entertain, to edify, or to support Party works. (And what's wrong with that?)

The diggers and exposers aren't really mavericks, or martyrs,though: They are rule-breakers, who for whatever reason calculated (often wrongly) that the benefits of breaking rank outweigh the consequences, saw some value in getting butter on the rug.  They're not "real journalists" who got caught (because: China-style "news" isn't really "news"); they're grand-standers who violated the trust of the state-run marketing agency that employed them.

That's where China is in 2010, and that's where it is likely to stay for a while. Get over it.  Think of it this way: I don't want the kid making my burger to get all avant garde and Chef Ramsey on my Big Mac, and neither does McDonalds.  (You probably don't want it either.) I know where to go for my gourmet grease, and I want my Big Mac to be a Big Mac. And that, more or less, is the situation with China's government-managed news agencies: billions and billions are served --- happily. Fancy some variety? Quality? Novelty? Nutrition? Go elsewhere. 

A former student of mine (she graduates next year) is on the fast-track to a brilliant career in international communications. She recently interned at the Xinhua bureau in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, where she helped facilitate Chinese to English translations. We met earlier this month when I was back in Zhejiang on business (I lived there from 2002 to 2009), and she said that she won't be training her career crosshairs on Chinese media organizations. The "management" of content - the adjustments, rearrangements, tactical reconfiguration of details - was too much to bear. No more Xinhua for her confused hua xin.

But don't mistake her for a potential ally in the war against China's state media machine. She's an idealistic 20 year-old Anglophile, born to well-heeled parents, slightly beautiful, and collosally naive.  She has a long list of Western friends, and has visited Socal and Hawaii, and in the words of a colleague of mine, she "has the world's oyster by the string".  The brass ring for which she is now reaching is corporate communications, and a few Western multinationals are already in her sights. She didn't have the spine for Xinhua, but she said that doesn't diminish the importance or value of the agency.  The masses need that kind of news, she confided; those like her can read The New York Times (etc.) on-line. "Between these two extremes, I can work out what's really going on". A good lesson for us all.

Will the new CNC World agency be at least slightly propagandistic? Of course.  Why shouldn't it be? Rather than engage them with full-throttle a prioristic dubiety, however, Americans ought to view this new portal to information (and opinion) with at least as much (but no more) circumspection and suspicion as they do Fox News, left- or right-slanted periodicals, and our nation's leading broadsheets.  In our hemisphere, market forces and reader/viewer demographics channel (and at times determine) copy content no less than do Party apparatchiks over in the PRC. This is something my idealistic former student - and many like her, both there and here - have yet to grasp.

Mr G and I are in agreement that Fox News is both very entertaining, and disturbingly undignified.  Their programs are slick, well-produced, and slightly quirky at times. They have an agenda, and they push it. They have perfected the commodifcation of "news" and its presentation as a form of entertainment, and if their version of American is rarely mine, stopped clocks have still the virtue of being right twice daily.  At least you know where you stand with Fox. The professional media man in me loves their packaging, their flow, and their reach. The philosopher in me worries about their impact upon our less-reflective citizens.    

But then again, I'm American, and so I'm right to worry about, say, the surely noxious  influence of the ravings of Glen Beck.

As for CNC World:  bie pa. Fear not. Let Zhongnanhai run Xinhua, run CNC World, run all Chinese media agencies and outlets.  We'll still have that edgy, gritty, soccer mom and Chardonnay propaganda from NPR to help balance our distortions.