Does Western media get it wrong on China?
Christine Lu asks a worthwhile question:
“Do you feel western media is misinformed about China? If so, what source of information do you rely on when it comes to staying informed on China?”
Plenty of Chinese think so. A Sina.com petition has garnered 1.19 million protest signatures alleging, “Western media organisations such as CNN and BBC have churned out untrue and distorted reports of the event,” according to AFP (via CDT). China Daily chimes in with an editorial: Media must be objective.”
Meanwhile, Tim Johnson of McClatchy and Simon Elegant of Time report getting prank calls and threatening faxes.
“If you go on acting like CNN, get out of China. Chinese people do not welcome you,†[the fax to Johnson's office] concluded. The writer signed off simply as “a Chinese person.”
Only one foreign journalist was actually in Lhasa when the riots broke out, James Miles of the Economist. He told the China Beat this:
The foreign media were almost entirely absent from Lhasa (a couple may have sneaked in under cover after the riots broke out but would have had limited access). Yet I have seen some very good reporting on what happened, notwithstanding the Chinese media’s nitpicking. Reporting in the official press, by contrast, while reasonably on the mark as far as the violence goes, has been highly misleading by failing to look at the bigger picture of unrest in Tibet and beyond, by not asking what might have caused this anger and by portraying this as the actions of a handful of people organised by the Dalai Lama’s “clique.” It wasn’t a handful, and I saw no evidence to suggest anything other than spontaneity.
Richard Spencer, from the Daily Telegraph, makes a similar point.
But explicitly - and in this they represent reality - government spokesmen do not want us to be “balanced”, and nor can we. We do of course quote government spokesmen, like Mr Zhang - and it makes them look absurd. But more than that, to “give both sides” means doing so with a level of engagement which the Chinese side is clearly determined not to allow. We cannot engage with the claims and counter-claims, often contradictory, coming out of officials and the state media.
A release through Xinhua says a policeman somewhere has been killed by rioters. We report this. But how easy is it coherently to quiz anyone about how, why and when this occurred? Will an eye-witness account be given? Will an honest assessment of injuries on both sides be given? When we ask, in what direction were the retaliatory shots fired, who was running where, do we get a response? There is no-one to give one. Phones are hung up. Spokesmen churn out one-liners, platitudes and what my old assistant used to call “nonsense-speak” which no-one believes. The government would rather not give us a narrative than give us one that we can pick at.
The pro-Tibet people, on the other hand, do answer their telephones (both the campaigns and the government). They engage in questioning. They differentiate between the claims of which they are certain, the claims they attribute to eye-witness reports, and the claims they say are second-hand and unverified. They seek to make what they say coherent and comprehensible.
They may not always be right, and to be sure they have an agenda, but the attempt to make sense at least wins some of our sympathy (though a surprising number of journalists remain suspicious of them).
Here’s my take: There isn’t nearly enough news coming out of China. What we get on this side of the Pacific is incomplete, often anecdotal, and for the most part written for an audience with little background on China.
The answer here is more news, more information, more voices. If China—its government and its people—want truly fair, factual reporting, the door is theirs to open.
Sunday, April 6th, 2008 : News : 3 Comments
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3 Responses to “Does Western media get it wrong on China?”
April 6th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Couldn’t agree more - as in all PR catastrophes it is the government’s absolute failure to say anything of relevance which has done the most to tarnish China’s image lately.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Sina.com also had a forum connected to the petition you refer to above. Several times I tried putting comments on it (in Chinese) that questioned whether Chinese citizens were getting the whole truth from their government - and each time the Internet police had erased my comments within minutes. And this is supposed to be a “forum” for discussion. The only discussion the Chinese want to hear is discussion that toes the party line. Any they think the West is biased!
April 21st, 2008 at 5:26 am
As an American who lived in Dalian for one year (and misses Dalian very much!), I am the first to admit that the media in the west (at least in the US and England) tends to be a bit “slanted†when it comes to reporting on China – or most of Asia, for that matter. Overall, coverage of Asia in American media is pretty weak. Perhaps this is due to the number of people of European descendent in this country, I don’t know. But for whatever reason, we seem to have much more media coverage about Europe and European affairs than we do about Asia. As a result, Americans in general know much less about Asia than they do about Europe, for example. Furthermore, it often seems that any media coverage of Asia tends to focus much more on the problems that exist there (environmental problems, human rights issues, etc.). When unfavorable coverage is what one mainly sees in the media, then one has a tendency to have a viewpoint that is, at best, uninformed and, at worst, very biased.
That said, I would not describe the media coverage in China as “balanced†either. I don’t think that this criticism will come as any surprise to most Chinese. Yes, there is increasing access to foreign media via the Internet in China, but, at present, this access falls far short of what one has access to in the west. Either way, having “access†to information from many sources, both domestic and foreign, is useless if one is unwilling to make use of this access and to educate and inform him/herself about the rest of the world. When people begin to see the world as “us†and “themâ€, as though “my country is superior and the center of the world, and therefore it’s unnecessary to understand other culturesâ€, then prejudices are bound to develop. Americans have been guilty of this too long and, considering the globalization that is occurring in this world, I hope that we’ll become a bit less self-focused.
Are there problems in China? Sure there are. Most Chinese people that I spoke to while living in Dalian (and while traveling throughout China) freely admitted that China faces many challenges in the future. However, we in the US also face many problems in our own country. Neither China nor America can rightfully take the moral high ground when it comes to casting aspersions on one another. Certainly Americans should not be pointing the fingers at others considering the mess we’ve made of the Middle East. In the end, we all want them same - a decent place to live, food to eat, and safe, clean surroundings.