In a scurry to live up to CMP’s promise to provide sideline analysis of Chinese media coverage of the Sichuan quake, we offer the following selections from Caijing magazine, one of China’s leading business and current affairs publications (now strongly online), and Xinhuanet, the online site of the official Xinhua News Agency.

Impressionistic and totally unscientific, these selections prove a point, admittedly, that hardly needs proving – that there are substantial differences in reporting style and focus between China’s commercial media and official party outfits like Xinhua and CCTV. While noting obvious differences, we should also recognize that not all reports from Xinhua, CCTV, China National Radio, etcetera, have focused narrowly on political figures and their movements and emotions.

© Kate Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Caijing, News Investigation, Xinhua
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Since broadcasting first on May 17, 1996, CCTV‘s program “News Investigation” has gone through ten years. The 459 episodes, together with the programs that were given orange stickers and locked away in a cabinet because they could not be broadcast, form a historical record of a television’s non-stop pursuit of the truth.

In producer Zhang Jie’s view, bringing out good progams always puts pressure on the producers. The pressure may come cause a good investigative report (especially one about public opinion oversight) to be shelved forever. Zhang Jie calls this a constant pressure because the public relations efforts of the investigative subjects “are responses that are like human instincts. Your program is touching the interests of certain people. You are affecting his reputation, his wealth, his official job and you may even cost him his life.”

A broadly circulated saying is that there is usually two long lines in front of the offices of the Focus Interview program: one of them is for the petitioners who travel from all over to country to tell their stories to the Focus Interview program and the other one is for the cadres who travel from all over the county and stay at hotels to ask Focus Interview not to broadcast anything critical about them.

See also CDT’s “CCTV Anchorwoman: Program On Corrupt Mayor Censored” (link)

© Michael Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCTV, media censorship, News Investigation
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